Innovation for grand challenges: the evolving role of service providers in Open Innovation ecosystems

Grand challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, and public health pressures persist despite technological and economic progress, calling for collaborative, multi-actor approaches that leverage knowledge, technology, and innovation. Within this context, open innovation represents a key paradigm for fostering ecosystems that enable resource exchange and collaboration across organizational boundaries. While prior research has extensively examined the roles of large firms, SMEs, and public actors in this context, the evolving contributions of open innovation service providers in this field remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates how service providers are adapting to address grand challenges within open innovation ecosystems through qualitative empirical research. The study identifies nine collaborative practices and introduces a threefold framework, encompassing value creation, value capture, and value sharing processes, that helps in understanding their role. The results show that open innovation service providers are transitioning from facilitators to strategic orchestrators, enabling new forms of ecosystem resilience and collective impact. This work advances theoretical understanding and offers practical insights into how more inclusive, adaptive, and impact-oriented open innovation ecosystems can be mobilized to address grand challenges.