ABSTRACT
While Open Innovation (OI) and user integration have been applied across industries over the last two decades more professionally and digitally, the life science (LS) sector has various obstacles and regulations to overcome in order to implement and execute OI initiatives as well as entire programs. Moreover, scientific research has been scarce on analyzing data in this industry. The number of companies applying OI methodologies has risen significantly in the last couple of years. However, intellectual property (IP) and data protection make it hard to get access to good insights. However, we have accompanied ten LS companies (including 48 OI initiatives/programs) using an action research approach based on various data (e.g., interviews) over ten years, including the time of the outbreak and dissemination of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we will share insights about 1) the unique characteristics of OI in the LS sector compared to other industries, 2) the identification of used OI methodologies and their success criteria, as well as 3) the change and influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of OI programs in the LS sector. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.