Abstract
While research on open innovation challenges has focused on how teams innovate by addressing an already-framed problem, less attention has been devoted to how teams can innovate by creatively re-framing a problem. Triangulating 10-months of participant observation data with interviews, meetings’ video recordings and secondary data, we conducted a longitudinal case study of a technology-focused open innovation project and developed a process model of creative re-framing. Our model identifies four mechanisms -challenging and re-configuring the client relationship; embracing and unpacking the problem’s complexity- that together underlie the ebbs and flows of creative re-framing in an open innovation challenge. Our primary contribution is showing that the evolving relationship between the client organization issuing the problem and the open innovation team is an important source of creativity, potentially leading to creative re-framing. Implications for research on open innovation and collective creativity are discussed.