Novelty generation in the off- line open innovation system: an Italian case.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of novelty emergence in the context of an “off-line” open innovation system. The idea is that, while several contributions address new forms of novelty generations that imply open innovation that is typically mediated by IT systems (e.g. Lakhani and Jeppesen, 2007; Afuah and Tucci, 2012; Lopez-Vega et al, 2016), when novelty generation takes place off-line, namely through new forms of collaboration happening in the so-called “physical spaces” of innovation (Montanari and Mizzau, 2016) and in widespread creativity contexts that involve whole cities and territories (Perry-Smith, 2006; Sosa, 2011), research is still largely busy in figuring out what the critical elements for novelty generation are, how and why they get together producing novelty in some cases, and do not in others. While it lays beyond the scope of this article to build a holistic model on novelty generation, this research -through an Italian case study- aims to introduce and trigger further efforts on theorizing novelty generation.