Boundless Era: A Collaborative Open Innovation Game

Teaching open innovation in management remains challenging because interorganizational collaboration is dynamic, relational, and difficult to grasp through traditional lectures or cases. This session presents Boundless Era, a serious, table-top collaborative game designed to help learners experience the tensions, constraints, and coordination challenges inherent to open innovation projects. Participants embody different organizational actors (startup, firm, university, government) and must collectively overcome innovation challenges cards while balancing individual and collective objectives. The game aims to develop learners’ understanding of open innovation as a socio-organizational process, strengthen collaboration and resource-coordination skills, and foster reflexivity toward interorganizational collaboration.