Guest Editorial: Open Innovation in the food industry: what we know, what we don’t know, what we need to know

Globalization, fast technological pace and rapid changes in customers’ needs have forced companies to rethink their innovation processes, as these processes have become riskier and more unpredictable. Increasing difficulty in retaining knowledge, together with the high costs connected with entirely internal development of innovation has pushed companies towards an the Open Innovation (OI) approach. OI can be defined as distributed innovation processes based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational and sectorial boundaries, which may involve networks of agents such as universities, start-ups, public and private institutions, external suppliers, and customers. The OI paradigm has reshaped many organizations’ understanding of innovation and competition over the last two decades. With this special issue, we have taken the first step to extent our knowledge base and contribute food for thought in relation to what constitutes best practices under various conditions in a diverse sector; what characterizes the sector’s actors and their collective innovation practices; what kind of knowledge and information flows occur; and provide a status of the nature of the contemporary research and knowledge landscape in the food industry. The special issues include eight articles, which represents a broad diversity in terms of topic and research methodologies used.