Open Innovation (OI) is presented as a necessity for meeting major societal challenges, such as managing epidemics, reducing poverty or combating climate. This has led to an increasing body of research named as “Open Social Innovation” (OSI). In this body, few scholars outline that OSI implies challenges and paradoxes, some of which are related to the well-known “paradox of openness”. They suggest that the paradoxes inherent in OI may manifest themselves differently in open social innovation (Ahn et al., 2019; McGahan et al., 2021). However, this question has not been the subject of specific research. This article therefore seeks to explore the nature of the paradoxes of openness in OSI in order to gain a better understanding of the tensions that hinder social value creation and the ways in which organizations manage these tensions. To do so, we conducted a literature synthesis that we refined thanks to four case studies from the agricultural sector in the Global South. Each case represents an inter-organizational OSI network that led to the creation of an innovative digital advisory service for farmers. In the results section, we present the specific characteristics of three paradoxes or pairs of tensions in OSI: knowledge sharing/protection; value creation/capture; accountability to donors vs. to beneficiaries. Finally, we specify the managerial implications of this study and suggest avenues for research to deepen the understanding of how social value is created and captured in OSI networks.
