Closing Open Innovation

The literature on open innovation has documented how companies expand their boundaries to become more open, leaving out how boundaries narrow as open innovation relationships end—the closing of open innovation. We explain how open innovation creates new relationships on multiple levels—among firms, individuals, and technologies. Drawing on open innovation and alliance literature, we discuss how the closing of open innovation entails the dissolution of this web of multiplex relationships. We contribute to innovation and strategy literature by explaining how the closing decision is not simply mirroring the initial decision to open up innovation, partly because of evolving interdependencies at multiple levels (firms, individuals, and technologies). Finally, we discuss how closing open innovation relates to new challenges in terms of attention, agency, long-lived interdependencies, and portfolio management that provide new avenues for future research.