Managing open innovation with public partners The case of smart cities

The main goal of this paper is to study the challenges found and the strategies followed by firms developing open innovation strategies with public partners in smart cities projects. For the last decade, the management of inbound and outbound knowledge flows is increasingly relevant in corporate strategies. Under the shadow of this new knowledge strategy, academia has tried to understand this topic producing a growing stream of literature on open innovation from Chesbrough’s (2003) seminal research. However, most of this research has focused on knowledge partnerships between firms. Both mainstream literature on open innovation and the older research on r&d cooperation have traditionally neglected the r&d cooperation between firms and public organizations (Perkmann et al., 2013). Sandulli et al., 2017).