Sustainability and Open Innovation: Main Themes and Research Trajectories

Abstract

Today, innovation and sustainability in their broadest sense, which includes people (social dimension), the planet (environmental dimension) and profits (economic dimension), are increasingly intertwined. Integrating the sustainability dimension into the innovation of products, services, processes, technologies, business and organizational models requires an effort on the part of the company as it demands a different set of knowledge and skills than those needed to innovate in a traditional way. As a result, companies, in order to integrate the dimension of sustainability in their innovation processes, have felt the need to exploit knowledge, skills and technologies external to the organization itself, promoting what is called the process of open innovation. Since this field of field is only recently being explored, we conducted a literature review through bibliometric analysis on a sample of 93 scientific articles published between 2011 and today, April 2022. To achieve the purpose of this review, both quantitative (co-occurrence analysis) and qualitative analysis have been conducted. Four different research themes have been identified: sustainable open innovation and innovation performance, the role of technological capability for sustainable open innovation, business model perspective and sustainable open innovation and university collaboration. As far as future research is concerned, a mainline has been identified concerning the study of sustainable open innovation in the agri-food industry.