Open Innovation as a Catalyst for Grassroots Entrepreneurship: Insights from Collaborative Digital Platforms in Nigeria

Open innovation has become central to understanding collaboration and competitiveness in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Yet, existing literature remains heavily centered on formal, well-resourced contexts, offering limited insight into how open innovation functions within the informal economies of the Global South. This paper conceptually examines open innovation as a catalyst for grassroots entrepreneurship in Nigeria, emphasizing how collaborative digital platforms shape innovation under structural and contextual constraints. It is guided by a Critical Realist perspective, collaborative exchange, learning and capability building, resource pooling, institutional mediation, and socio-cultural mediation that enable or constrain innovation. The paper develops a Critical Realist-informed conceptual framework that explains how structural conditions and contextual enablers activate or suppress collaborative innovation mechanisms that theorizes the interaction between structure, mechanism, and context, incorporating a feedback loop to show how outcomes inform policy learning. The study contributes a context-sensitive, middle-range conceptual explanation that extends open-innovation theory toward inclusive and sustainable entrepreneurship in African settings.