As digital technology becomes embedded in the core of customer offerings, companies find themselves being part of dynamic networks and must develop more open and distributed innovation processes. However, important and mature industrial domains, such as the automotive sector, find it difficult to fully utilize digital technologies due to closed innovation processes. Therefore, automotive companies try to attract external software developers by establishing new organisational forms for open digital innovation. Yet, the understanding of the problems that the organizational forms are expected to solve, how the organizational interventions should be designed and their effects on digital innovation are uncertain. Therefore, our goal is to contribute with knowledge of how the automotive industry can accelerate digital innovation by mindfully selecting and designing appropriate organisational interventions for open digital innovation. In this research in progress paper, we present a two-year action design research project and contribute with initial empirical results on the problems with open digital innovation in the automotive industry, a comparison of organizational forms for open digital innovation, based on a literature review and an assessment of the organizational forms’ potential to overcome the problems. The next step is to perform a structured literature review, and to design and implement an organizational intervention to facilitate a first iteration of externally initiated innovation cases.