Systematic Review of Open Eco-Innovation Research Landscape in the Industrial Sector

Open eco-innovation (OE) studies is an emerging research domain of potential contributions to sustainable industrial development. Openness benefits environmentally friendly firms by strengthening their relationships with environmentally responsible external partners thereby ingraining them in the social fabric of environmental innovation systems. Exploratory, bibliometric and network visualization mapping techniques were applied with the aim of synthetizing and characterizing the available knowledge in the field of open eco-innovation research. The systematic review is based on a sample of 102 articles published over the period of 1990 and 2019, which have been retrieved through a bibliometric search in Scopus. Results show that the literature on OE has increased significantly in the last eight years and this trend is likely to continue. It was noted that OE research landscape is at the acceleration phase. The results also indicate that both analytic and synthetic modes of external knowledge sourcing are complementary. The study unraveled clusters of fields of studies that could represent theoretical perspectives with which theory of open eco-innovation could be built. This paper contributes to the literature on open innovation by tracing the growth trajectory and mapping the theoretical base of the OE research field while pointing to new OE themes.