The System Thinking Perspective in the Open-Innovation Research: A Systematic Review

The new logics of competitions are mostly based on exploiting relationships to implement new mechanisms in managing Knowledge. Today, a successful company should be, lean, modular, and with a smart approach to new products development. In this context, the source of competitive advantage cannot be found into a static heterogeneity of resources, but companies must be able to create and manage a dynamic competitive process to continuously reinvent their products/services and to re-combine their resources with their partners’ ones. A paradigm for this behavior is the Open Innovation one, as created by Chesbrough. According to the rules of this paradigm, companies have to acknowledge that they operate in a network of relationships, they must be open to cooperate with their external partners, and they must not try to limit their actions in reaching only for some pre-defined result. So, Open Innovation Networks appear to be similar to those described by the scholars in the Complex Adaptive Systems field where the actions of the system, and of its parts, are the result of the various actors’ interactions in an emergent way. In this paper, we use a Systematic Literature Review approach to explore how the main topics in the System Thinking Perspective, and in particular, those related to Complex Systems, are linked to the Open Innovation studies.