OPEN BIFOCAL INNOVATION: Open Innovation committed to Sustainable Development.The Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam case-study

The European Union Strategy 2020 aims to increase the competitiveness ensuring a sustainable and inclusive growth by enhancing the current knowledge society. This research, through recursive phases of a case-study, explores the dynamics of openness strategized by the (public) Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam pioneering an open-digital-strategy. This research strives to understand frameworks which drive practices for “opening up processes for managing business and societal challenges” by investigating the possibility to link Open Innovation (OI), a pertinent paradigm in complex scenarios, to Sustainable Development (SD). The first stage (focusing on the specific case-study field of arts management) investigated how a ground-breaking open-digital-strategy could develop new avenues for business and social value, boosting cultural institutions’ competitive advantage and being a possible source of socio-cultural development –by exploring and enhancing the opportunities of the digital-era and of the visual culture, making art and culture more accessible, stimulating people to value Cultural Heritage and unlocking the potential of Culture and Creative Industries (CCIs). The research aims at showing how open-digital-strategies could be a precondition to develop positive-synergies and alliances that, moving towards the digital, creative economies, catalyse a wide range of spillovers. Thus, it also strives to adds knowledge on the topic of innovation in the cross-fertilization territories of the CCIs. Then, focusing on the resources managed and disseminated, this research addressed the issues of Intellectual Capital (IC) and how organizations can regenerate the wider ecosystem. This stage shows that organizations (no matter whether public, private, profit or non-profit) need to develop new understandings of how to create and exploit their non-financial resources. The OI emerged as an effective booster of processes that enable the improvement of economic and socio-cultural performance by mobilising IC outbound flows that generate “shadow options” for the future. The last stage focused on the OI-paradigm (extending its implications beyond the field of the research-setting) by gaining insight into the potential benefits and challenges of OI linked to SD –interpreted at a macro-level, thus with an external orientation of the sustainability issue, and as a “responsibility” that each individual organization has of nurturing the ecosystem in which it is nested, for safeguarding the commons for future generations. An Explorative Conceptual Framework, which describes the dissimilarities between the prevailing firms’ OI-paradigm and the public organization case-study, is proposed. And it is used for thought-provoking issues to link OI to SD claiming the need (1) to recalibrate the main strategic focus of focal organizations, by recalibrating the main profit-maximizing ethos pursuing sustainability not merely as a by-product of the OI-strategy, and by decentralising the firm as the locus of strategic commitments, and (2) to go beyond the un-exploration of outbound practices, approached merely with an exploitative attitude. The antecedents of the openness emerged as fundamental for effectively recalibrating the OI main strategic focus and going beyond the un-exploration issue. The Open Bifocal Innovation concept is proposed as a valuable strategic ethos to link OI to SD. For managing SD driven OI strategies it is crucial to explore new paths to capture opportunities of economic value not “simply” elsewhere in the value chain (as the prevailing OI-paradigm postulates), but by radically innovating the value chain –converting the relinquishment of control on critical assets into bifocal innovation paths. Since exploration connects to radical innovation, explorative outbound practises emerged as fundamental to commit OI to SD –thus un-exploration of outbound practices is a limit to link the prevailing OI to SD.