Open eco-innovation: A bibliometric review of emerging research

The growing concern about the environmental future of the Planet urges us to foster eco-innovation research and implementation in companies. Access to external knowledge, R&D collaboration, and open innovation are recognized as essential drivers of eco-innovation. Despite the growing interest, research on the topic is still scarce. The present article strives to clarify the concept of Open Eco-innovation, shows its importance, and maps existing research applying a systematic approach to a literature review, bibliometric and science mapping analysis, using citations from Web of Science and Scopus databases. The results give an overview of academic discussions that led to the topic of Open Eco-innovation, demonstrate a growing interest from the scientific community, and reveal comprehensive bibliometric data concerning leading authors, research groups, affiliations, and most notable publishers and publications. The article also proposes a new conceptual framework for the research on Open Eco-innovation, which represents the main clusters and topics of discussions distributed among macro, meso, and micro-levels of analysis.