Andreas Pinkwart, Nagwan Abu El-Ella

• We examine open innovation within the context of science-to-business collaboration and outline the main opportunities offered by open innovation to both businesses and academia. Two main challenges of science-to-business collaboration are also highlighted: the marketing of scientific results and competences, and the development of trust-based knowledge transfer mechanisms. Furthermore, the article shows how open innovation offers ways for overcoming those challenges. We start by providing a background to open innovation and the significant opportunities it opens up, especially for businesses. Then the article traces the parallel development in universities’ innovation systems. This is followed by a discussion of the emerging challenges for science-to-business collaboration in the context of open innovation. Finally, we conclude with some key points for future research.