Open innovation and its discontents Nancy Ettlinger Department of Geography, 1036 Derby Hall, 154 North Oval Mall, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA article info Article history: Received 15 July 2016 Received in revised form 20 January 2017 Accepted 20 January 2017 Keywords: Open innovation Crowdsourcing Networks Digital economy Labor Subjectivity Regime of accumulation Neoliberalism abstract This paper critically synthesizes empirics and issues in discrete inter-disciplinary literatures to identify ‘open innovation’ as part of an emergent regime of accumulation, overlaying and co-existing with flexible production, and encompassing novel firm-level strategies, new forms of corporate networks, and a dis- turbing capital-labor relation that informalizes innovative work while cultivating entrepreneurial but self-exploiting subjects. I explain the novelty of open innovation, its genealogy, and the implications for people and conditions of work as much as for firms in a new topology of power relations. I cast the ensemble of strategies and tactics encompassed in open innovation as contingent, continually unfolding, and sometimes chaotic if not destructive for both firms and labor, in contrast to the celebratory tone in the business as well as geography and regional studies literatures regarding its benefits for competitive- ness, innovativeness, value capture, and development. Open innovation – the externalization of innova- tion – entails long-run approaches to innovation and investment that are fraught with problems, prompting the development of short-term tactics to engage the challenges. One short-run strategy, crowdsourcing, bypasses the conventional web of inter-firm relations to connect digitally with individu- als of the global crowd, enabling firms to reap the benefits of the crowd’s innovative talents, often with- out remuneration under circumstances that institutionalize informal work. These neoliberal subjects are best understood in terms of multiple subjectivities. I close by connecting the crowdsourcing of innovative with non-innovative work, both of which are parts of the emergent regime associated with new hiring and work practices that usher in new modes of exploitation. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper identifies ‘open innovation’ as part of an emergent regime of accumulation that encompasses novel firm-level strate- gies, new forms of corporate networks, and a capital-labor relation that informalizes innovative work while cultivating entrepreneur- ial but self-exploiting subjects. Open innovation generally is distin- guished by a new approach to innovation: externalizing it. Under the regime of flexible production, innovation remained relatively fixed, ironically in a Fordist-oriented, in-house strategy as firms principally externalized production activity via outsourcing and offshoring. The lack of attention to innovation in the midst of the development of flexible production is unsurprising because the externalization of innovation was outside epistemic knowledges of production and corporate strategy until it became normalized by the opening decade of the new millennium. Critics of the regime of flexible production noted that it ironically remained implicitly Taylorist and rigid regarding inter-firm relations (Peck, 1992) despite numerous flexibilities (Atkinson, 1984), but rigidities regarding innovation remained outside the purview of the litera- ture. This paper critically synthesizes empirics and issues from interdisciplinary literatures to explain the novelty of open innova- tion, its emergence and evolution, and the implications for people and conditions of work as much as firms and their networks. ‘Open innovation’ was coined by business guru Henry Chesbrough (2003) in 2003 to refer to the new business paradigm by which firms look outside their boundaries for innovations while purportedly sharing innovations and benefitting over the long run, a new form of outsourcing that contrasts sharply with the short- termism of outsourcing production in association with flexible accumulation (Jacobs, 1991; Johnson et al., 1989; Zysman and Tyson, 1983). As I explain, the landscape of open innovation is complex. Externalizing innovation encompasses an ensemble of corporate strategies that entail long-run approaches to innovation and investment, which, despite the celebratory tone of business and economic oriented literatures, are fraught with problems such as short-term loss of revenues, difficulty with externally accessing innovations rapidly and efficiently, and more generally, difficulties in meeting shareholders’ expectations. Consequently, firms have developed an array of short-run strategies to meet these chal- lenges, and other firms – indeed a new industry, patent trolling – has emerged to capitalize destructively on weak links in the open innovation landscape. I explain the ensemble of strategies encom- http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.01.011 0016-7185/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. E-mail address: ettlinger.1@osu.edu Geoforum 80 (2017) 61–71 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum