Open innovation is a phenomenon that has been widely accepted by both practice and theory over the last few years. On the contrary, partner relationships have attracted little attention while the open innovation could not be emerged without the link to partners. This paper identifies and evaluates a framework for the partner relationships and open innovation processes. Based on the literatures regarding open innovation and partner relationships, we propose the framework of matrix type. We present results based on 352 open innovation cases reported during 2002-2009, and each case is classified into 5 different categories of the framework. JV-C(Joint Venture relationship & Coupled process) archetype has dominated the cases with 178 cases(50.6%) where JV-O(Joint Venture relationship & Outside-In process) follows JV-C with 124 cases(35.2%). No significant change has been found in the number of cases after 2003 when open innovation firstly suggested. However, the number sharply increases in 2009 by boom in JV-C and JV-O. These results show the importance of partner relationships and preference toward Joint Venture relationship in open innovation, while the conventional approaches has just focused on value-chain partnership. We find remarkable collaboration cases contributed by universities and government invested research centers, so the role of non-profit R&D organizations has also been discussed.