Clusters and communities: raising the bar towards open innovation 2.0 paradigms

The growing success of open innovation practices in many firms raises the question of whether such principles can be transferred for reinventing public sector organisations. A paradigm based on principles of integrated collaboration, co-created shared value, cultivated innovation ecosystems, unleashed exponential technologies and extraordinarily rapid adoption is the so-called Open Innovation 2.0. The development of this approach reflects the perception that the innovation process has evolved. This study aims to explore new ways to study healthcare networks as key tool for innovation creation and spreading, by deploying the emergent paradigm of Open Innovation 2.0. Design/methodology/approach: The study investigates the impact of clusters, or localised networks, involving industrial, academic and institutional players, in the (bio)pharmaceutical setting; the aim is to enrich the line of inquiry into cluster-based innovation by applying a social network analysis (SNA) methodology, with the aim to provide new perspectives for recognising how the set of interactions and relationships in the (bio)pharmaceutical context can lead to higher levels of knowledge transfer, organisational learning and innovation spreading.