Open innovation and sustainability in the digital age: opportunities and challenges

Open innovation has increasingly been recognised as a critical driver of organisational performance, enabling firms to access external knowledge, share risks, and leverage complementary resources. At the same time, increasing thought has been devoted to the role that open innovation may play in advancing sustainability, particularly in response to the pressing environmental and societal grand challenges we are currently facing. Given the relevance of this topic, this editorial presents a comprehensive examination of how the joint consideration of open innovation and sustainability can lead to superior organisational performance and benefit society as a whole. After the description of the current state of knowledge, categorized into four main research streams, the manuscript summarizes the main findings of the papers published in this issue. The eight articles explore this intersection between open innovation and sustainability through a variety of theoretical approaches and methodological designs, highlighting both the opportunities and challenges of leveraging open innovation for environmental, social, and economic sustainability, while underscoring the contingent nature of such benefits. We conclude this editorial by outlining future research directions worth investigating regarding open innovation and sustainability. Overall, we contribute to the debate regarding open innovation and sustainability in the digital age by offering an integrated, empirically grounded view of how openness contributes to the creation of environmental, social, and economic value.