Open Innovation Practices of European Companies: A Survey Posted on 26 August 2011 Innovation strategies of companies have recently been strongly influenced by the urgent need for cooperation and coordination with more or less close external sources. This is roughly what the term “Open Innovation” covers, dealing with how to optimize investment and to take advantage of opportunities offered by information technologies and new areas of value creation (first and foremost, social networks). If the need of resorting to external sources is unquestionable, for reasons of technological development, we do not yet have an articulated and integrated vision of business practices (beyond isolated cases of success), barriers and possible limits to open innovation.