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Economic and management studies have investigated the origin and dynamics of firm boundaries in-depth, dealing with their influence on the production and the commercialisation processes of goods and services. Recently however the analysis of the boundaries in their various dimensions (horizontal, vertical, within or outside the firm, in terms of communities, etc.) switched away from production and commercialisation, to integrate a focus on the innovative process. The question thus became: which are the appropriate boundaries to be designed in order to catalyse innovation? Whereas historically this core and strategic activity was mostly kept internal, firms progressively have been reconsidering alternatives between doing innovation by themselves, with others, or simply by buying innovative products on the market. Indeed, according to Chesbrough et al. (2006) adopting an open innovation strategy is a key to success, but not the only one as noted by Pisano and Verganti (2008). Hence, we have recently seen the development of new forms of distributed innovative models and practices such as markets for ideas, crowdsourcing, open source co-development, which shed new light on the analysis of firm boundaries.

L’objectif de ce travail est de définir la notion de crowdsourcing, de proposer une typologie des différentes formes de crowdsourcing existantes (crowdsourcing d’activités routinières, de contenu, d’activités innovantes) et de mettre en lumière les enjeux, avantages et limites de ces pratiques pour les organisations qui souhaitent y recourir. Au-delà de cette analyse, cet article s’interroge sur les conséquences des pratiques de crowdsourcing pour les organisations : l’émergence du crowdsourcing doit-elle nous amener à repenser les raisons de l’existence des organisations, la définition de leurs frontières et de leur structure ?

Open innovation has attracted extensive interest (and has raised numerous debates) in the recent literature on economics and management of innovation. If rich and stimulating, open innovation remains however a loose concept, which calls for further exploration of its shapes and stakes. This article precisely intends to 1) question the originality of the open innovation paradigm, by confronting it with other related concepts developed in the literature previously; 2) investigate more in depth the new modalities that open innovation may take in reality; and 3) discuss the rationales and challenges of the different declinations of the open innovation model by analyzing their benefits and their costs. In other words, we both summarize the state of the art on open innovation and identify research tracks worth being investigating in the future.