OC has drawn scholarly interest because of its potential per-formance impact on innovation and its implications for society. Innovation and performance relate to different levels: the individ-ual’s performance, the performance at goods, the overall system level. The impact at the industry level is also puzzling. Some firms have been affected positively, others negatively. The free encyclo-pedia Wikipedia has managed to achieve the quality of Encyclope-dia Britannica, which, after 244 years in circulation, has ceased to produce their books. Apparently, OC is transforming industries. Re-cent modeling drawing upon innovation theory and the concept of private-collective innovation argue that with increasingly decreas-ing communication and production costs, open and collaborative innovation models will increasingly become superior to producer innovation models[2]. However, what affects the performance of OCs – even why they are viable – remains critical question. An agent-based model has been recently developed theorizing that the dynamics in the system has a significant impact on the ability to solve complex problems in an open and collaborative way[1,5]. Performance also relates to the question of sustainability and continuous value creation for all participants of OC. Taking an evo-lutionary perspective we argue that the OC system will go through phases of tensions. In OC such tensions relate to the competition versus collaboration at the individual level, creative abrasion ver-sus ‘being a stranger’, time required for contributions versus time constraints, flexibility versus standardization. Generative responses rather than structure are required to ensure sustainability and re-spond to these tensions[6]. The emergence of different roles and technological affordances that support fluidity and dynamics may enable OC system to overcome these tensions and to sustain itself. Understanding what the dynamic drivers of continuous innovation and sustainability of OC are is of utmost importance.