Network analysis of open innovation in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

ABSTRACT Open innovation (OI) is a crucial strategy regardless of sector, public or private, or academic or practical. However, the concept itself is often considered abstract and broad. Therefore, this study explored the coauthorship network and its groups to empirically observe the phenomenon of an open innovation. It also examined the semantic network of subject fields in open innovation research. We used coauthorship data to observe collaboration among authors. To examine how an open innovation is conceptualised and explained in academia, we used the abstracts of papers and the classification data of the journals where the papers were published. The results of the analysis found a mainstream group, which is a small group-to-group connection. We observed that the small groups are connected by key authors. We found that a social network of authorship and a semantic network of abstracts are both closely related. Our results provide a deeper understanding of an open innovation.