Henry Chesbrough is Executive Director of the Centre for Open Innovation, a unit of the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization at UC-Berkeley, and leading figure in the world of innovation and open-innovation per se. Here’s what they have to say on the subject;

Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation. With knowledge now widely distributed, companies cannot rely entirely on their own research, but should acquire inventions or intellectual property from other companies when it advances the business model.

Open Business Models create value by leveraging many more ideas, due to their inclusion of a variety of external concepts, and can also enable greater value capture, by using a key asset, resource, or position not only in the company’s own business model but also in other companies’ businesses.