"We have everything to win": Collaboration and open innovation in public administration

While the concept of open innovation has attracted significant industry and research interest in the past five years, there remains a paucity of research on the application of the concept in noncommercial settings. This paper presents an exploration of a network of Swedish municipal authorities. Within this network, we have observed a move from isolated innovation to the purposive leveraging of knowledge inflows and outflows in a manner characteristic of the open innovation paradigm. This paper presents a characterization of these knowledge exchanges using an existing framework of open innovation archetypes, as well as a description of the business model impacts of these innovation approaches for the participant municipalities. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for future research.