The ever increasing connection of objects calls for ever increasingly systemic innovation management project, involving more and more players in ambitious innovative initiatives. Project management and open innovation provide useful frames to tackle this challenge but remain quite decoupled fields of research. We still lack of knowledge about how OI projects should be managed. We investigated three cases of OI projects, involving an heterogeneous set of partners, embarked three years together to develop an ambitious value proposition (interoperable EV charging network, automotive data marketplace, autonomous car-based urban mobility system), highlighting the management, coordination and management issues. Results show project mode provides great incentives for all partners to overcome internal limitations and provoke final results which wouldn’t have been possible without it. We point the need to keep OI projects under strict project management methodologies, but enlarging their scope and time-scale to allow teams building and using knowledge together at a multi-project scale.