The Limits of Open Innovation: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

Open Innovation (OI) has become a popular method of value co-creation over the past two decades. While OI offers many benefits, it holds a high failure rate. Through a systematic literature review, this paper identifies 15 common limitations of OI that contribute to this high failure rate at three levels: organizational, operational, and individual. Accounting for these limitations and their relationships, we develop a framework for OI's critical success factors. This paper also offers an agenda for future research and makes contributions toward understanding OI systems and their governance from a practical standpoint.