A best of breed platform for Open Innovation

Achieving successful, repeated organizational innovation is a never ending primary challenge for companies. But often this cannot be pursued in a standalone modality. New practices are emerging to foster innovation, by building networks for collaboration and leveraging networks of outsiders. A structured collective approach to favor cross-fertilization and technology transfer among companies is needed. This work first builds a framework to analyze the existing Open Innovation Platforms, then presents a classification of the web ones that permitted to propose a conceptual best of breed platform for collaborative innovation. We address how it is possible to create a collaborative network through open innovation platforms, highlighting the best context and the dynamics of the cross-fertilization among different actors and innovation roles. Basing on literature and empirical analysis, in our opinion the main roots to feed an innovation ecosystem based on web platforms are: communities, selforganization and cognitive diversity.