The advancement of web technologies has created an opportunity for developing tools for real-time collaborations, text-mining, interactive data visualisations, sharing reproducible compute environments, etc. These tools can change the ways researchers share, discover, consume and evaluate research and help promote open science and encourage responsible research behaviours. Through its Innovation Initiative, eLife invests heavily in software development, new product design, collaboration and outreach so that the potential for improvements in the digital communication of new research can start to be realised. In particular, we support exclusively the development of open-source tools, with extensible capabilities, that can be used, adopted and modified by any interested party and actively engage the community of open innovators. In this talk, we will introduce the following projects: * Fostering collaboration and innovation through hacking: eLife Innovation Sprint * Mentoring and empowering a generation of open innovators: eLife Innovation Leaders We believe that openness is crucial to the future of research, and by supporting the community and promoting open-source research software, we can help build a culture towards integral, collaborative, open and reusable research. We hope to share some of our visions and learnings, and invite feedback and contributions from the wider open-source community on the next steps forward.