Open Innovation is a model used to describe how nowadays companies source and exploit new
technologies, new products and services. Web-Based Intermediaries (WBIs) have entered the
emerging innovation market and are expected to dramatically increase the number of innovation
exchanges. However there are not yet clear theoretical guidelines supporting the design and
management of such intermediaries. We use organizational sense-making theory and relative
absorptive capacity (RAC) theory to analyze the factors that still hinder Open Innovation. From sensemaking theory and RAC theory we draw directions on the services WBIs need to provide in order to
effectively support an innovation market. Since information technology is critical to the success of a
WBI, we also give directions on how ICT and KMS can be used in order to support these services
