The ISPIM conference in Barcelona, Action for Innovation: Innovating From Experience, attracted more than five hundred delegates from almost fifty countries, which made it the largest ISPIM event to date. From the papers presented, eight were invited for formal review, and the six papers in this special issue are the result of further development and refinement of these submissions. Mazzola et al. focus of this paper is on exploring linkages among Open Innovation practices and firm performance. They investigate the concurrent influence of specific inbound, outbound and combined Open Innovation practices on both innovation and economic-financial firms’ performance using data from a sample of 105 companies listed on the IM&C of NASDAQ. Land sperger et al. analyse network managers’ direct and indirect influence on network’s relational and goal achievement performance. Their results suggest that a network manager enhances innovation network’s core management functions, which in turn improve the relational performance (RP) and significantly drives the goal achievement performance. This paper received the Alex Gofman Award for the best student paper. Schweitzer and Gabriel analyse the impact of creativity, knowledge gathering, project planning and formalization on the efficiency and effectiveness of the early stages of development using data from 352 B2B-companies from technologyintensive sectors. They find that project planning is fundamental for front-end efficiency, but has no direct influence on effectiveness, whereas knowledgegathering has the opposite relationship, and that the quality of collaboration is more important than that quantity. Interestingly, creativity appears to have no influence on efficiency nor effectiveness of the early stages. Simula and Vuori also International Journal of Innovation Management Vol. 16, No. 6 (December 2012) 1202002 (2 pages) © Imperial College Press DOI: 10.1142/S1363919612020021