Open innovation and its discontents

This paper critically synthesizes empirics and issues in discrete inter-disciplinary literatures to identify ‘open innovation’ as part of an emergent regime of accumulation, overlaying and co-existing with flexible production, and encompassing novel firm-level strategies, new forms of corporate networks, and a disturbing capital-labor relation that informalizes innovative work while cultivating entrepreneurial but self-exploiting subjects. I explain the novelty of open innovation, its genealogy, and the implications for people and conditions of work as much as for firms in a new topology of power relations. I cast the ensemble of strategies and tactics encompassed in open innovation as contingent, continually unfolding, and sometimes chaotic if not destructive for both firms and labor, in contrast to the celebratory tone in the business as well as geography and regional studies literatures regarding its benefits for competitiveness, innovativeness, value capture, and development. Open innovation – the externalization of innovation – entails long-run approaches to innovation and investment that are fraught with problems, prompting the development of short-term tactics to engage the challenges. One short-run strategy, crowdsourcing, bypasses the conventional web of inter-firm relations to connect digitally with individuals of the global crowd, enabling firms to reap the benefits of the crowd’s innovative talents, often without remuneration under circumstances that institutionalize informal work. These neoliberal subjects are best understood in terms of multiple subjectivities. I close by connecting the crowdsourcing of innovative with non-innovative work, both of which are parts of the emergent regime associated with new hiring and work practices that usher in new modes of exploitation.