From Silos to Synergies: Rethinking Innovation through Hybrid Models in Complex Contexts

Marta Najda-Janoszka, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland

 

Aims and Scope of the Call for Paper

In the context of escalating global uncertainties—ranging from environmental degradation and socio-economic inequalities to rapid technological disruption—innovation is increasingly expected to deliver more than technological novelty. It is tasked with generating adaptive, inclusive, and sustainable responses to complex, multi-dimensional challenges. However, the innovation models traditionally mobilized in response to such challenges—whether rooted in structured scientific inquiry (STI) or experiential, user-based learning (DUI)—are now widely seen as insufficient when applied in isolation (Jensen et al., 2007; Marzucchi & Montresor, 2017). While STI offers formalized, often linear pathways for knowledge production, and DUI emphasizes embedded, practice-based learning, both frameworks struggle to cope with the complexity, ambiguity, and multiscalarity of current socio-technical transformations (Parrilli & Radicic, 2021).

Emerging from this recognition is a wave of hybrid innovation models that seek to combine systematic rigor with responsiveness and contextual adaptability (Najda-Janoszka, 2025). These models take shape across a variety of settings—from open innovation frameworks (Chesbrough, 2003; El Maalouf & Bahemia, 2022) to distributed digital platforms (Ozturk, Turker & Nasir, 2023), innovation ecosystems that integrate diverse institutional actors (Klimas & Czakon, 2022; Isaksen & Nilsson, 2013), to living labs (Stuckrath et al., 2025; Najda-Janoszka et al., 2025; Schuurman et al., 2016), which engage users and stakeholders in iterative co-creation. These configurations are often credited with fostering flexible governance, accelerating feedback cycles, and generating solutions attuned to both local needs and systemic complexity (Alcalde-Heras & Carrillo-Carrillo, 2024). Crucially, hybrid models have been shown to enable mutual learning across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, helping to reconcile top-down strategic visions with bottom-up innovation practices (Bokolo, 2024). They also provide structural flexibility to experiment with governance arrangements, enabling iterative adaptation in response to stakeholder feedback, contextual shifts, and implementation failures, while simultaneously facilitating the integration of diverse knowledge forms into actionable project design (Lehmann, Frangioni, & Dubé, 2015; Schuurman et al., 2016).

Yet, despite their promise, hybrid models are not without tension. As they bring together diverse actors, knowledge systems, and institutional agendas, they often generate new forms of complexity. Rather than automatically fostering openness and collaboration, such diversity can give rise to tensions around power, purpose, and epistemic alignment (Najda-Janoszka, 2025; Van der Heijden & Kuhlmann, 2017). Competing institutional logics and rigid governance structures can obstruct coordination and erode trust among actors in hybrid innovation systems, particularly when informal and formal sectors are brought together (Bhattacharjya, Bhaduri, & Kakoty, 2023). Participatory approaches, central to many hybrid configurations, and environmentally focused and community-based innovations, frequently face challenges in maintaining engagement, clarifying roles, and ensuring that contributions translate into shared value (Schuurman et al., 2016; Stuckrath et al., 2025). These frictions are echoed in living lab and co-innovation platform research, which highlights how participatory ambitions often collide with practical constraints. Engagement fatigue, ambiguous actor roles, and disconnects between contribution and impact frequently lead to stagnation or failure – even in digitally enabled environments (Ozturk, Turker, & Nasir, 2024). Moreover, the accumulation of diverse knowledge across iterative cycles can result in cognitive overload, making it difficult for stakeholders to integrate insights into decision-making (Lehmann, Frangioni, & Dubé, 2015). While such infrastructures facilitate distributed collaboration and real-time knowledge exchange, they may also entrench silos, amplify access asymmetries, or obscure decision-making processes (Lafuente, Vaillant, & Rabetino, 2023; Bokolo, 2024). Such issues point to the need for critical, context-sensitive investigation into how hybrid innovation models operate in practice, and under what conditions they genuinely enhance adaptive capacity, inclusion, and resilience.

Consequently, this Special Issue calls for a deeper interrogation of how hybrid innovation processes are structured, governed, and evaluated in light of pressing environmental imperatives and broader socio-technical transformation. We invite rigorous, critical, and interdisciplinary contributions that explore the possibilities, limits, and ambiguities of hybrid models – not as idealized solutions, but as evolving, contested spaces of experimentation and negotiation. Potential research areas may include, but are not limited to:

  • conceptual frameworks that critically interrogate the nature, formation, and evolution of hybrid innovation models across diverse socio-technical and institutional landscapes;
  • studies examining how hybrid models navigate tensions between hierarchical control and distributed authority, formal mandates and emergent practices, or centralized planning and local responsiveness;
  • investigations into how structured scientific knowledge, tacit community insights, and experiential expertise are mobilized, translated, or marginalized within hybrid innovation processes;
  • empirical research exploring how differences in institutional capacity, legitimacy, or access shape participation, influence, and outcomes in collaborative innovation settings;
  • analyses that move beyond success narratives to explore disengagement, fragmentation, co-option, or governance overload in hybrid configurations;
  • cross-contextual research that highlights variation in how hybrid innovation unfolds across regions (e.g., Global North/South), domains (e.g., health, energy, education), or institutional settings (e.g., universities, municipalities, social enterprises);
  • studies on how digital platforms enable or constrain participatory innovation, focusing on issues such as algorithmic governance, data sovereignty, access asymmetries, and design affordances;
  • critical examinations of how hybrid innovation models are evaluated, what metrics are used (or neglected), and how feedback mechanisms shape iterative adaptation and legitimacy;
  • research into the pace, phasing, and temporality of co-creation cycles, particularly how hybrid models manage or mismanage urgency, continuity, and institutional memory;
  • case studies and theoretical contributions exploring how hybrid innovation models emerge or adapt in response to crises such as climate change, pandemics, political instability, or resource shocks;
  • exploration of how individuals, organizations, or technologies act as intermediaries or translators across epistemic, institutional, or cultural boundaries in hybrid innovation ecosystems.

 

This Special Issue Call is supported by the Campus Living Lab at the Jagiellonian University, an open, transdisciplinary platform for co-creating actionable knowledge and community-centered solutions. The Lab fosters real-world experimentation and inclusive innovation across domains such as environmental sustainability, digital accessibility, social wellbeing, and public policy design.

Submission Guidelines

Submission deadline: November 30, 2025
Reviewed papers:  February 28, 2026
Final version of papers: March 31, 2026
Issue published: 2026

Please submit the paper proposals to JEMI at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (indicating the title of the thematic issue: "From Silos to Synergies").

Papers that pass the initial vetting process will undergo a double-blind peer review. Submissions must be in English between 8,000 - 12,000 words. All submissions must follow the submission requirements (paper template, title page, declaration by authors) posted on the JEMI website at https://jemi.edu.pl/submission-and-policy. Papers not adjusted to our formal guidelines will be desk rejected.

References

  • Alcalde-Heras, H., & Carrillo-Carrillo, F. (2024). The effects of business innovation modes on eco-innovation: where do environmental benefits materialize? European Planning Studies, 32(12), 2516–2534. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2024.2377220
  • Bhattacharjya, B. R., Bhaduri, S., & Kakoty, S. K. (2023). Co-creating community-led frugal innovation: An adapted Quadruple Helix? Technovation, 128, 102760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2023.102760 .
  • Bokolo, A. Jr. (2024). The role of community engagement in urban innovation towards the co-creation of smart sustainable cities. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 15(3), 1592–1624. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-023-01176-1
  • Chesbrough, H. W. (2003). Open innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology. Harvard Business School Press.
  • El Maalouf, N., & Bahemia, H. (2022). The implementation of inbound open innovation at the firm level: A dynamic capability perspective. Technovation, 122, 102659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2022.102659
  • Isaksen, A., & Nilsson, M. (2013). Combined innovation policy: Linking scientific and practical knowledge in innovation systems. European Planning Studies, 21(12), 1919–1936. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.722966
  • Jensen, M. B., Johnson, B., Lorenz, E., & Lundvall, B. Å. (2007). Forms of knowledge and modes of innovation. Research Policy, 36(5), 680–693. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2007.01.006
  • Klimas, P., & Czakon, W. (2022). Gaming innovation ecosystem: Actors, roles and co-innovation processes. Review of Managerial Science, 16(8), 2213–2259. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-022-00518-8
  • Lafuente, E., Vaillant, Y., & Rabetino, R. (2023). Digital disruption of optimal co-innovation configurations. Technovation, 125, 102772. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2023.102772
  • Lehmann, V., Frangioni, M., & Dubé, P. (2015). Living Lab as knowledge system: An actual approach for managing urban service projects? Journal of Knowledge Management, 19(5), 1087–1107. https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-02-2015-0058
  • Marzucchi, A., & Montresor, S. (2017). Forms of knowledge and eco-innovation modes: Evidence from Spanish manufacturing firms. Ecological Economics, 131, 208–221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.08.032
  • Najda-Janoszka, M., Kajzer-Bonk, J., Milewska, E., & Wrona, S. (2025). Integrating science, technology, and experimental knowledge for sustainable innovation: A Living Lab approach to urban biodiversity management. Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation, 21(2), https://doi.org/10.7341/20252123 
  • Najda-Janoszka, M. (2025). Synergizing science and experience: Systematic literature review on strategic integration of STI and DUI modes for enhanced innovation outcomes. In J. Chen & R. Lenart-Gansiniec (Eds.), Handbook on Post-Schumpeterian Innovations (in press). Edward Elgar Publishing.
  • Ozturk, E., Turker, H.B. and Nasir, V.A. (2024). Critical success factors of co-innovation platforms: A systematic literature review. Innovation & Management Review, 21(3), 168-181. https://doi.org/10.1108/INMR-06-2022-0081
  • Parrilli, M. D., & Radicic, D. (2021). STI and DUI innovation modes in micro-, small-, medium- and large-sized firms: Distinctive patterns across Europe and the U.S. European Planning Studies, 29(2), 346–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2020.1754343
  • Schuurman, D., De Marez, L., & Ballon, P. (2016). The impact of living lab methodology on open innovation contributions and outcomes. Technology Innovation Management Review, 6(1), 7–16. https://doi.org/10.22215/timreview/956
  • Stuckrath, C., Rosales-Carreón, J., & Worrell, E. (2025). Conceptualisation of campus living labs for the sustainability transition: An integrative literature review. Environmental Development, 54, 101143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2025.101143
  • Van der Heijden, J., & Kuhlmann, J. (2017). Studying incremental institutional change: A systematic and critical meta-review of the literature from 2005 to 2015. Policy Studies Journal, 45(3), 535–564. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12191
  • Välikangas L., Järvenpää S. L. (2021). How collaborative networks fail, with the implications for participants learning. In Todt G., Backmann J., Weiss M. (Eds.), Work life after failure?: How employees bounce back, learn and recover from work-related setbacks (pp. 173–190). Emerald Publishing.