A bibliometric review: exploring the intersection of the Internet of things and open innovation

. The Internet of Things (IoT) has dominated the technological environment recently. It is shaping how organizations interact, collaborate, and share knowledge. Its ability to connect everything creates endless opportunities for open innovation (OI) and vice versa. This paper aims to provide a bibliometric review to assess the research status quo and emerging trends on the role of IoT in open innovation. Our findings highlight the evolution of research on IoT and OI over time, the most influential authors and countries in this field, and the topmost journals and conferences in which IOT and OI researchers published their work. We also used Vosviewer to map keywords co-occurrence, which led to identifying six distinct related clusters. Finally, we identified limitations and future research avenues that may enable academics and practitioners to embrace the potential of IoT in driving open innovation initiatives.


Introduction
In the last few years, The Internet of Things (IoT) and open innovation have captured the interest of many researchers.They can revolutionize industries by altering their culture, reinventing their business process, rethinking human interactions, and promoting collaboration.The Internet of Things is a network of intelligent "objects" equipped with sensors, software, and connection capabilities.Hence, it can gather, process, and share realtime data to build a network capable of delivering novel features and digital business models.Simultaneously, open innovation has aroused a new breed of innovation.It proposes an innovation management model that pushes firms to open up their innovation process that emphasizes collaboration, knowledge sharing, creativity, and co-creation between organizations and external stakeholders.Therefore, it allows firms to create business value, accelerate time-to-market, succeed, expand, and maintain high profitability.
The combination of these two powerful concepts presents a compelling research topic that warrants a thorough bibliometric review.Therefore, this study aims to identify key trends, countries that contributed to IOT & IO, the Top Cited authors that contributed to the area, journals led in the field, and the most used Keywords in IOT & IO.
We structured the paper as follows.Section 2 explains the methodology used in this bibliometric review.Section 3 summarizes the results of the analysis.Finally, section 4 presents the discussion, conclusion, limitations, and future research avenues.

Research Methodology
To meet the aim of this study, we conducted a bibliometric analysis to review and assess the importance of the articles related to Internet-of-things and open innovation.We extracted relevant publications from two main academic databases, namely Scopus and Web of Science (WoS).Owing to their multidisciplinarity, extensive indexing process, broad peer review research papers, reliable analytical tools, and advanced search capabilities.Thus, we addressed the following research questions using the steps illustrated in Fig. 1

Web of Science
After combining the findings from each database, we identified 140 papers (see Figure 1).However, we found that some articles were duplicates, and a few ones were not available.Therefore, we carefully eliminated them to prevent a recurrence.
In the second phase, we assessed and selected the most relevant publications related to the Internet of Things and open innovation based on the inclusion criteria listed below (see Table 2), which led to accessing 26 papers eligible for evaluation (see Table 3).The graph reveals that Italy has the most publications and citations, followed by Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.Germany, on the other hand, has more articles but fewer citations.This demonstrates that Europe is leading research on our subject, next comes America, followed by Asia.

Authors
The number of citations they receive determines a researcher's impact in a given field.Figure 4 represents the most influential authors who wrote about the Internet of Things in open innovation.According to our analysis, the most cited author is G. Santoro, followed by José M. Munoz in second place, and V. Scutto in third place, with 366 citations, 281 citations, and 212 citations, respectively.

Keywords Clusters
In this sub-section, we used Vosviewer to explore the correlations and patterns among relevant keywords within selected research papers.Vosviewer divided the literature into six clusters that focus on different aspects, as shown in Fig. 7.The biggest number of keywords was seven, while the lowest was two (see Table 3).The terms in the same group seem to share many similarities.(6,10).Moreover, other authors pointed out the powerful combination of IoT and OI in engaging users in co-creation, enhancing collaboration, easy access & sharing of common resources, testbeds, and living labs facilities (3,4,11).
The main keywords identified in cluster two are Innovation capacity, Knowledge flows, Knowledge management capacity, and Knowledge management system.The authors stated that open innovation uses facilities provided by IoT to enhance inside-out and outside-in knowledge flows and to offer new ways to structure and manage knowledge (16,21).However, (25) stated that what matters is the locus of communication, namely digital channels, and platforms (e.g.GitHub, Twitter, …).
The three main keywords found in cluster three are Artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Sensors, and Social media.The authors stated that the combination of these technologies in interconnection with the Internet of Things (IoT) could promote open innovation.They leverage traceability and transparency, real-time data, automation, predictability, secure data transactions, Crowd-sensing, Feedback, and data-crowded from consumers (15,17,18,20).When applied in the Internet of Things context, these practices can encourage collaboration, customization, automation, lower barriers to entry, and deliver great value (5).
The two main keywords found in cluster five are big data and crowdsourcing.The authors highlighted the importance of integrating Big Data into IoT given the number of robust tools they offer (e.g.chemometrics, UV-VisNIRS in the Agri-Food industry) (20), which allows smart and instant decision-making, more optimization, adaptability, and proactivity (15,26).innovation techniques, namely "Crowdsourcing".When applied, it taps into the power of collaboration and collective creativity to provide valuable insights and ideas for new highly innovative products, cost-consumer-environment friendly that fulfill customer and market requirements (20,26).
The sixth cluster's two primary keywords are ecosystem and open innovation.As Robert et al., (2017) stated getting everything connected requires building a unique global ecosystem where things interact with one another effortlessly (13).Hence, it has been shown that IoT can help manage complex ecosystems and support innovativeness by enabling a sustainable collaboration and partnership with the members of the ecosystem (e.g.IBM smart cities, start-IoT, LoRaWan, NB-IoT) (10,17,23).

Conclusion
In this article, we performed a bibliometric review of the Internet of Things and open innovation.The results are the outcome of a comprehensive analysis based on Scopus and Web of Science Data from 2011 to 2023.According to our findings, 2011 and 2017 produced the highest number of papers, while 2018 garnered the most citations.However, noticed that research on the junction of IOT and OI is scarce, with only four peer-reviewed publications annually.Thus, this study is a call to academics to linger on this topic so that it receives the consideration it deserves.There were 14 countries identified as publishing geographical distributions, and the most productive ones were European countries, followed by America and Asia.African countries had no presence.Future research should focus on IoT and OI in Africa.Our study also showed that 'Technological Forecasting and Social Change' and 'IEEE Internet of Things' are the most cited, whereas 'Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity' and 'International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising (ICE)' have published the highest number of documents about our research.Thus, we advise researchers who want to publish or read on the subject to reach this journal.Moreover, finding suitable data can be time-consuming, given the wide range of literature and data sources.Thus, our paper assists authors by offering them appropriate resources related to this issue until 2023.To support our research, we conducted a keyword analysis with VosViewer software to gain a greater understanding of the key terms, textual ties, and research concentration areas.We identified six interconnected clusters of literature centered on the terms "Internet of Things" and "open innovation".The analysis of the preceding underlined the importance of IoT and IO in both, the public and the private sectors.However, we have noticed that the intersection of the two is a source of disagreement among authors.Some authors argue that the Internet of Things, alone or combined with other technologies can stimulate open innovation in all of its forms.Conversely, other authors claimed the implementation of open innovation approaches unlocks new avenues for IoT.The third category of authors stipulated that IoT and OI go hand in hand to offer scalable, sustainable, cost-affordable, easy-to-operate, and user-friendly innovative solutions.
The main limitations of the study lie in our initial search.Considering we only relied on Scopus and Web of Science, future research should include other databases to cover additional journals.Aside from inclusion and exclusion criteria and time limits.The terms included in the search query could have limited the scope of this study; future research may include "crowdsourcing," "collaborative innovation,"... and so on.In addition, Future research should conduct a literature review over a longer period to assess the research advancements, provide a more in-depth understanding of the issue, and uncover more relevant research gaps.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The proposed methodology for 'IoT' & 'IO' bibliometric reviewMoreover, data was collected in a two-phase screening procedure to ensure the articles' quality and relevance.In the first phase, we conducted preliminary research on Scopus and Web of Science by scanning the titles and abstracts including the terms 'Internet of things' and 'open innovation'.This initial search phase generated 158 papers on IOT and OI.Then, we limited the findings to articles and conference papers written in English, generating 79 papers on Scopus and 61 on Web of Science (see Table1).

Figure 3
Figure3represents the roots of the relevant papers selected based on the inclusion criteria.The graph reveals that Italy has the most publications and citations, followed by Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.Germany, on the other hand, has more articles but fewer citations.This demonstrates that Europe is leading research on our subject, next comes America, followed by Asia.

Fig. 7 .
Fig. 7. Keyword co-occurrences network.The keywords found in cluster one were Co-creation, Future Internet, Internet of things, Living lab, Smart Cities, Smart objects, and User-driven open innovation.These elements interconnect within the realm of IoT and open innovation.The authors emphasized the potential of the integration of the IoT and future Internet in Living Labs in the co-creation process of smart cities, new products and services, and novel business models based on collaboration and open innovation (1,2,7,23).Whereas, some authors claimed that leveraging open innovation helps exploit the opportunities of IoT(6,10).Moreover, other authors pointed out the powerful combination of IoT and OI in engaging users in co-creation, enhancing collaboration, easy access & sharing of common resources, testbeds, and living labs facilities(3,4,11).The main keywords identified in cluster two are Innovation capacity, Knowledge flows, Knowledge management capacity, and Knowledge management system.The authors stated that open innovation uses facilities provided by IoT to enhance inside-out and outside-in knowledge flows and to offer new ways to structure and manage knowledge(16,21).However,(25) stated that what matters is the locus of communication, namely digital channels, and platforms (e.g.GitHub, Twitter, …).The three main keywords found in cluster three are Artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Sensors, and Social media.The authors stated that the combination of these technologies in interconnection with the Internet of Things (IoT) could promote open innovation.They leverage traceability and transparency, real-time data, automation, predictability, secure data transactions, Crowd-sensing, Feedback, and data-crowded from consumers(15,17,18,20).The keywords identified in cluster four are open business, open product development, and open source hardware.Send et al., (2023) defined each concept, arguing that they promote open innovation principles (e.g.information sharing, and user involvement …).When applied in the Internet of Things context, these practices can encourage collaboration, customization, automation, lower barriers to entry, and deliver great value(5).The two main keywords found in cluster five are big data and crowdsourcing.The authors highlighted the importance of integrating Big Data into IoT given the number of robust tools they offer (e.g.chemometrics, UV-VisNIRS in the Agri-Food industry)(20), which allows smart and instant decision-making, more optimization, adaptability, and proactivity(15,26).Moreover, the nexus between these technologies led to the development of new open The keywords identified in cluster four are open business, open product development, and open source hardware.Send et al., (2023) defined each concept, arguing that they promote open innovation principles (e.g.information sharing, and user involvement …).

Table 1 .
Scientific database search query and amount of articles

Table 3 .
Papers eligible for evaluation 3.1 Annual Publications and CitationsFigure 2 shows that the number of published papers is quite low, with no more than four published between 2011 and 2017.It continued in the same rhythm until it peaked in 2011 and fell steadily until 2016.Following that, it varied, dropping one year and climbing the next, reaching a larger number of citations in 2018.According to the graph, researchers have not yet given the required attention to studies on the Internet of Things in open innovation.