Fostering Open Innovation in Digital Platforms in Post-Pandemic Era: An Updated Framework for More Effective Collaboration with Customers

COVID-19 quickly pushed organizations towards challenges they could never have imagined. However, the crisis should represent a period of substantial business building and innovation. The immediate signs of this are already visible, including overnight digital transformation, making the most of data, and virtual customer engagement. In this current socio-economic context, in which organizations face growing innovation challenges, the ability of resilience is even more required, and it becomes more and more linked to the open collaborative innovation process, above all in digital platforms. In particular, organizations should leverage the ability to observe any change in the consumers' collaborative attitude caused by the pandemic and to proceed with an adaptation of the platforms accordingly. This work aims to contribute to this literature gap. After reviewing existent literature developed in open innovation and digital platforms domains, a conceptual framework is elaborated. The proposed model suggests that any organization should monitor the impact that Covid-19 has had on the collaborative attitude of consumers, in order to foster open innovation process. In particular, it creates a link between the effects of the pandemic on the main reasons that push towards consumer participation and collaboration in digital platforms and the consequent and necessary remodelling of the platforms themselves.2n