The Handbook of Global Science, Technology, and Innovation

Chapter 24From Governmental Open Data Toward Governmental Open Innovation (GOI): A Global Perspective

Sabine Brunswicker and Jeremiah Johnson

Introduction

Over the last decade, the burgeoning discourse on “open innovation” highlights the shift from an innovation model of private investment and hierarchical control toward an increasingly “open” and boundary-spanning notion of innovation (Chesbrough 2003b, 2006). Open innovation represents a distributed innovation process based on purposive managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries (Chesbrough and Bogers 2014). The growing body of literature on open innovation reports that some firms waive control of some internal innovation-related knowledge, and make such knowledge freely available to organizational actors and individuals that participate in the distributed process of innovation (Alexy, Goerge, and Salter 2013). The application of such “selective” revealing is relatively rare among profit-seeking organizations, but there is evidence that innovation-related knowledge and alleviating control over knowledge flows may create innovation benefits (Henkel, Schöberl, and Alexy 2014; Chesbrough and Brunswicker 2014).

While the early discourse about open innovation and selective revealing, both in practice and among scholars, was primarily concerned with profit-oriented, R&D-intensive firms, it is recently expanding to new levels of analysis and new innovation contexts. One of these levels is the governmental organization ...