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.
Ecosystems of Innovation Support Services appear as critical tools to accelerate innovations in agriculture and contribute to responding to the Grand Challenges for achieving the SDGs. Deepening our understanding of the drivers and models of service ecosystems’ emergence is needed to improve their efficiency. Our research builds on theoretical frameworks of service ecosystems, alignment and emergence in different activity sectors. Considering the specificities of innovation in the agricultural sector, we propose new insights on service ecosystems’ emergence through the evolving role of the hub organization along the innovation journey. We took an abductive approach anchored in over 5 years of case study data regarding innovative labelling of organic farming in Sub-Saharan Africa (technical, social and organizational innovations mobilizing several innovation support services). We identified three phases of emergence with several necessary preconditions, two different emergence models related to the nature of the hub organisation and two key drivers conditioning emergence.
