It’s a way of companies doing innovation and R&D where they make much greater use of external ideas and technologies in their own business and, in turn, let their unused ideas be used by others.
The fundamental premise of open innovation is not all the smart people work for you. A statement by Henry Chesbrough, author of "Open Innovation, The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology". Findest, a startup co-founded by Vincent Franken and one of the winners of The Academic Startup Competition, is an example of a technology scouting service that uses the principles of open innovation to combine human- and artificial intelligence to find technologies for R&D-challenges.