Leveraging open innovation to improve society: past achievements and future trajectories

Open innovation (OI) is an approach which describes a purposive attempt to draw together knowledge from different contributors to develop and exploit innovation. It has become clear that OI directly benefits organisations' economic performance and resilience, but researchers, practitioners, and policy makers became also convinced that OI might be the way forward to tackle the world’s most pressing societal challenges, representing unresolved Grand Challenges, which can only be weathered by diverse sets of collaborative partners that join forces. Although anecdotal evidence points at how OI practices can be employed to achieve societal impact not only in private firms but also in public organisations, very little understanding exists ‐beyond anecdotal‐ to link OI to societal impact. This special issue has the ambition to start the discussion and establish a framework as the stepping stone to tackle this complex research gap.     

Gender Differences in Time Use over the Life Course in France,Italy, Sweden,and the US

Abstract

This contribution analyzes how men and women in France, Italy, Sweden, and the United States use their time over the life cycle and the extent to which societal and institutional contexts influence the gender division of labor. In order to test the hypothesis that contextual factors play a crucial role in shaping time allocation, this study considers countries that diverge considerably in terms of welfare state regime, employment and paid working time systems, family policies, and social norms. Using national time-use surveys for the late 1990s and early 2000s and regression techniques, the study not only finds large gender discrepancies in time use in each country at all stages of life but also determines that institutional contexts, in particular the design of family policies and employment regimes, do shape gender roles in different ways, and that Sweden displays the lowest gender gap in time allocation across the life course.