Governments are facing unprecedented major challenges brought by financial crises, birth declining and aging population, climate and environmental changes, among other issues. All these interrelated factors create a volatile and increasingly complex environment which the public sector must continually adapt to. This raises the question of how governments will continue in the coming years to offer responsibly relevant and effective public services. Several experts in public governance share the view that innovation can be a response to these challenges [5, 8, 15]. In general, we can define innovation as the implementation of a new idea that led to a change in practice in order to create some kind of value [11]. Green et al. [6] reported that most innovations in services, even public, are made possible, activated and stimulated by the development of new technologies of information and communication (ICT). Furthermore they are considered suitable to improve the efficiency, accessibility and transparency, and are crucial to design, implement and monitor policies and services [2]. However these potential benefits, at the state of the art is recognized that implementing ICT-enabled innovation in the public sector, ask to consider the complexity of its relationship with systemic factors related to organizational culture and governance mechanisms, among others [1, 3, 12, 14]. Management of innovation in public sector becomes even more critical in the current scenario where the promotion of open government is imposing itself as the main paradigm for governments willing to be actually open, accountable, and reactive to citizens and constituencies needs. Nowadays, the main results are actually related to a number of data portals that however contributes mainly to increase transparency, whereas resulting not enough for increasing openness and inclusion as promises of open government [10, 13]. These issues are strictly related to the need for a theory of public sector digital innovation which integrate contributions from the research in the field of e-government [4, 7, 9] and theoretical foundations from innovation and management research that surround and can be applied to study and experiment digital and ICT-enabled innovation in public sector, thus, attempting to transpose them on e-government research. In particular, in this paper we question the linkages and influences between open innovation paradigm [16] and e-government research. To this end a literature review is carried out to i) understand how open innovation has been interpreted by e-government scholars and ii) to identify key characteristics of open innovation in the public sector, which are subsequently mapped to some ongoing open government initiatives in Canada.