Practicing theory and theorizing practice: Using an Open Collaborative Platform to facilitate meaningful interactions between academia and industry

The aim of this paper is to explore how a technological platform can connect multiple stakeholders towards educating open innovation ambassadors. In other words, how both academics and practitioners focusing on open innovation can ‘meet’ to constructively nurture openness in practice. The paper presents an exploratory case study of how a technological platform has served as the place where meaningful interactions among students, academics and practitioners of open innovation emerged with interesting insights for all. The themes that emerged revolve around the notions of affordances, boundaries, co-creation, interactivity and wholeness. The study contributes a discussion about how openness can be enacted in theoretical institutions and organizational contexts and offers possible avenues through which to build a bridge among all stakeholders.