Paper long abstract:

This theoretical paper proposes how existing work in Innovation Studies (IS) and in Science and Technology Studies (STS) can complement each other in the research on innovations. The paper discusses the relationships of existing open innovation research of IS and Systemic Innovation Model that originates from STS. The open innovation research in IS has detailed understanding about mechanisms and types of open innovation, but lacks clarity in ways describing the activities, networks and relations of these processes, which is the tradition and vocabulary of STS, provided by the Systemic Innovation Model.

Open innovation has been one of the hot topics of Innovation Studies (IS). It has discussed open innovation in various ways, such as inbound and outbound open innovation as ways how firms open up the innovation process. Open innovation has also entered the development of public services in terms of cross-organizational collaboration and has increased the public engagement in the service development. The most influential academic work on open innovations has been about large firms and mostly about different ways of practicing open innovation and the variety of open innovation activities.

The work of IS on open innovation "black boxes" the innovation processes and its objects. It is proposed how Systemic Innovation Model can open up the box by providing concepts for analyzing the heterogeneous socio-materiality and the networks of actors of these processes. It is also proposed that the STS tradition can extend the research on open innovations to other domains not discussed at large in IS.