International open innovation: Taking stock and moving forward

This chapter discusses some of the key open issues related to the organization of R&D in an open innovation context. Over the last decade, the ‘Open Innovation’ paradigm has been increasingly indicated as a panacea to firms’ problems in the innovation process. Although it has increasingly been considered as ‘the paradigm’ for organizing innovation, there still remain a few open issues related to the process and the extent to which external knowledge might enhance performance, particularly in an international distributed context. The goal of this chapter is twofold. First, it aims to present some controversial findings related to the use of external knowledge in the innovation process. Second, it aims at presenting relevant avenues for future research in this domain with a specific focus on internationally distributed contexts. While any claim of comprehensiveness would be certainly foolhardy, our goal is mainly that of highlighting a few topics we believe might constitute interesting avenues for future research at the intersection between the organization of R&D and international business.