Purpose - This paper aims to depict many-to-many innovation conceptualizations (Lundvall, 2007), in order to understand which are the most relevant features theorized as leading to the expected results on the basis of what scholars described in their researches. When scanning literature, it is possible to observe that the growing interest for the topic led to the definition of different innovation labels as those analysed in the present research, namely 'system innovation', 'network innovation' and 'ecosystem innovation'. In order to pinpoint common and different elements in the three literature contexts, we performed a bibliometric analysis on a database built through scholars contributions.Design/methodology/approach - The wide literature on innovation has been collected through three different perspectives, leading to a set composed by more than 19.000 contributions. We chose a bibliometric approach (Callon, 1986) to analyse this wide set of literature and we investigated the keywords provided by authors through a double-step co- word (He, 1999). The first part gave us the chance to examine the whole set, and then we had the opportunity to compare the sub-sets related to the three different perspectives, in order to acquire a better understanding of the elements linking contributions on innovation.Originality/value - Literature on innovation is huge (Chesbrough, 2006) - even through contributions arising by combining different fields of science -, but an analysis about the evolution of this topic is missing, especially by taking into account the contexts of innovation. Nowadays, innovation is becoming more and more open than in the past, hence a better understanding of the theoretical evolution of innovation contexts can be helpful to investigate the emerging contributions and framing them in line with what scholars did in last decades.implications - The investigation performed led us to make theoretical contributions, namely to highlight the relevance of management, as an activity needed to get out the best from open context, especially as it concerns knowledge. Moreover, the role of strategy had a decreasing relevance when moving from system to network to ecosystem literature, while it is the opposite for technological features as they emerge in the three contexts of innovation and in direct relation with knowledge.