Managing Open Strategy in Public-Private Sector Business Model Innovation: Closing to Open and Opening to Close as Intertemporal Dualities

Approaches to the management of strategic openness in organizations remain poorly understood. This article presents a large-scale qualitative, longitudinal study into a pioneering public-private sector business model innovation in the UK. By synthesizing insights from literatures on open strategy, open innovation, and open business models, the article reveals the practices in establishing a public-private sector business model. Challenging the simplistic assumption that more openness is inherently beneficial, recent scholarship has called for a constitutive view of open strategy - one that recognizes openness as existing in tension with closure. In this view, strategic openness includes navigating open-closed paradoxes through deliberate practices of ‘opening to close’ and ‘closing to open’. These practices raise critical strategic questions about when and where it is ideal to open and to close. To address this dynamic paradox, by adopting a longitudinal qualitative single case study design incorporating three co-located organizations as embedded units of analysis, we introduce a framework that unpacks openness and closure through the sub-dimensions of transparency versus secrecy and inclusivity versus exclusivity. The sub-dimensions are further analyzed in relation to value creation and value capture in business model innovation. Finally, the article presents a novel methodological framework that combines phenomena construction, abductive theorizing, and pattern matching to develop research questions grounded in large longitudinal data sets.