Contemporarily, agriculture is facing many challenges connected with growing food demand and scarcity of natural resources. In meeting these challenges innovation has become of crucial importance. The paper aims at providing an insight on the topic of the needs and possibilities of open innovation and its significance for the transition towards sustainable and more productive agriculture of EU. We argue that given the complexity of innovation process there emerges the need for effective interactions between all actors of agriculture sector. We conclude that new instrument of EU policy: European Innovation Partnership, which promotes open innovation approach should facilitate emergence of networks of collaboration in agriculture. Such an approach will stimulate innovation processes and will help to give better responses to contemporary challenges faced by agriculture.