Open Innovation in the Food Industry: What we know, What we don’t know, What we need to know

Open Innovation has been a paradigm that reshaped the approach to innovativeness and competitiveness during the last two decades (West and Bogers, 2014). Globalization, fast technological pace, rapid changes in customers’ needs asked the companies to rethink their innovation processes as they became more risky and unpredictable (Chesbrough, 2013). The difficult to retain knowledge together with the high cost connected with the purely internal development of innovation pushed the companies to an open innovation approach that includes the network of agents such as universities, start-ups, public and private institutions, external suppliers, and customers (Chesbrough, 2013). This has led the companies towards an open approach both in search of skills as well as innovation and R&D (Johnston, 2020).Regarding the food industry, studies have revelated that open innovation, collaborative networks and M&A can represent a viable approach to increase competitiveness, customer satisfaction, and sustainability (Annosi et al., 2020; Kiessling, et al, 2020; Bogers et al., 2020; Kafetzopoulos et al., 2020; Enzing et al., 2011; Garcia Martinez et al., 2014). The few food and beverage companies that actively pursue an open innovation approach appears to have a better innovation performance that results in stronger long-term position on the market and better profitability (Bayona-Saez et al., 2017; Enzing et al., 2011; Miglietta et al., 2017). The recent events related to the COVID-19 situation places additional pressure on companies to look for different, more flexible and more collaborative perspective about innovation and business models (FAO, 2020a). In these unprecedented times, the entire food industry has been heavily impacted by COVID-19. In the same time requests for the organic production (Melovic et al., 2020), and therefore new, more efficient, and more sustainable business processes are needed, especially in the food industry (FAO, 2020a; 2020b).Although several companies have already moved to open innovation, we do believe that more and more companies will progress to open innovation rapidly and that managerial support is necessary. (Barham et al., 2020; Alassaf, et al., 2020). Seminal studies explore the relation with open innovation and knowledge flows (Baima et al., 2020; González-Moreno et al., 2019; Fertő et al., 2016; Moreno‐Mondéjar et al., 2020) and sustainability programs (Bogers et al., 2020), or show the significant beneficial influence of open innovation in the food industry. However, additional research is needed to explore the impact and best practices for successful open innovation adoption in the food industry (Saguy and Sirotinskaya, 2014). The decisions of firms, policymakers, and managers need to be informed by research. We envision that this special issue will extent our knowledge base and contribute food for thought in relation to, among other things, what constitutes best practices under various conditions in a diverse sector; what characterizes the sector’s actors and the their collective innovation practices; what kind of knowledge and information flows occur; and, in general, provide an status fo the nature of the contemporary research and knowledge landscape in the food industry.