A Festschrift is a book to honour someone, so it is fitting that two publications will be marking the 70th birthday of Henry Chesbrough the ‘father of Open Innovation’ with special features. A conference is also being organised to celebrate his contribution to innovation research.
Calls for contributions have been announced for California Management Review (‘Firm Openness and Industry Dynamics’), and Industrial & Corporate Change.
The conference will be held on 20-21 April 2026 at Luiss Business School in Rome.
Call for papers
The festschrift conference is intended to create a record honouring Henry’s work. Authors of papers submitted to this developmental workshop will be asked to confirm their intention (if accepted) to participate in the CMR special issue or the ICC special section.
The two calls are significantly different, so authors should read each Call for Papers carefully before submitting, as few (if any) topics would be suitable for submitting to both calls. Each review process is also different, due to the requirements of the respective journals.
If successful, the presenter should plan to spend two nights at one of the nearby conference hotels, and attend the entire conference. Presenters are free to attend sessions in either track, and plenary and social events will span both tracks.
Call for Industrial and Corporate Change: ‘Innovation Spanning Organizational and Disciplinary Boundaries: Contributions in honor of Henry Chesbrough’.
Research on open innovation has assumed or examined mechanisms that overlap the work of many other streams of research. Such overlapping mechanisms mean there are commonalities between open innovation and other major streams of research. However, research to date has tended to be siloed by boundaries between disciplines and research streams.
Papers submitted for this special section should explore how these common mechanisms between these other bodies of research and open innovation create opportunities to inform open innovation (or vice versa), as well as synergistic opportunities to combine Chesbrough’s work with other streams.
The guest editors are Carliss Baldwin, Linus Dahlander, and Joel West.
Call for California Management Review: ‘Firm Openness and Industry Dynamics’.
The 21st century has brought a shift from proprietary control to open innovation and other firm strategies for openness, including open business models, open strategy, and open source software. This special issue seeks further evidence on the questions:
What impact has openness had on the shape of firms and industries?
What are the implications of such impacts for management?
The guest editors are Oliver Alexy, Marcus Holgersson, Christopher Tucci, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West.
The deadline for electronic submission of papers (for both tracks) is 1 February 2026.
The conference committee consists of
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Elena Bruni, Luiss Business School
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Marcus Holgersson, Chalmers University of Technology
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Wim Vanhaverbeke, University of Antwerp
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Joel West, Keck Graduate Institute (committee chair)
