Open and sustainable: An emerging frontier in innovation management?

The concepts of openness and sustainability have both enjoyed an increasing popularity in recent scientific literature. However, research has yet to fully utilize their combination and the potential carried toward developing strategies and policies toward solving complex sustainability issues. The primary objective of this paper is to identify and describe the theoretical connections between sustainability and open innovation. We investigate the structural and statistical aspects of recent open innovation literature in search of signs of sustainability using bibliometric metadata and perform a content analysis of articles relevant to Sustainable Open Innovation. Our findings indicate that despite a lack of institutionalized use of sustainability-related keywords, circa nine per cent of the sample articles materially discuss aspects of sustainability or societal concerns from various perspectives, but also lack a holistic and unified approach. As our primary contribution, we shift the level of inquiry in Sustainable Open Innovation research from an organizational-level toward a multi-level system understanding, situating our findings regarding open and sustainable forms of innovation present in the literature as a framework containing the individual, organizational, city, and regional levels and their interconnections.