Eco-innovation and openness: Mapping the growth trajectories and the knowledge structure of open eco-innovation

Open innovation runs contrary to the individualistic mentality of traditional corporate R&D implementation while embracing external cooperation in a complex world. Our main motivation for the study is to assess and characterize knowledge structure that represents radical transformation toward accelerating co-development of sustainable innovations. Our review points to the role of the open eco-innovation research landscape as an emerging research domain of potential contributions to sustainable development. Specifically, in this systematic analysis, we apply exploratory, bibliometric, and network visualization techniques to characterize the available knowledge in the field. We trace the growth trajectory of this emerging literature and map the knowledge base of the open eco-innovation (OE) research field. We conceptualised four phases of research domain development and recognised that OE is at the acceleration phase. We emphasized that a synthetic knowledge base is one of the basic ingredients of an open eco-innovation model in addition to analytic and symbolic knowledge bases. Finally, we highlighted what might seem to be budding theoretical perspectives underlining open eco-innovation.