Search results

China has climbed from 22nd in the Global Innovation Index Rankings in 2017 to 11th in the 2022 due to the transition of its manufacturing firms from assemblers to system integrators. This paper examines how firms can enhance their innovation capability through inbound and outbound open innovation.

This paper applies both open innovation and a knowledge-based view and proposes a conceptual framework that encompasses innovation capability and the significance of tacit knowledge acquisition. A questionnaire was designed to collect relevant data from 139 Chinese manufacturing firms in six regions to test this framework.

The authors found that inbound open innovation has a stronger impact than outbound open innovation on synergistic innovation capability. The acquisition of skill-based tacit knowledge has a slightly stronger intermediary role between open innovation (no matter inbound or outbound) and synergistic innovation capability than cognitive tacit knowledge does.

Firms should improve external tacit knowledge acquisition efforts to generate new knowledge, inspire the innovation passion of employees and implement ambidextrous open innovation.

This paper makes a good first step to analyze the effect of ambidextrous open innovation on the synergistic innovation capability of Chinese manufacturing firms. It verifies the role of skill-based and cognitive tacit knowledge acquisition and provides new reflections on open innovation strategy in emerging economies, thus enriching open innovation and knowledge-based theories.

Open innovation is regarded as the driven factor for organizational resilience, but open innovation's role and effect mechanism in leveraging organizational resilience has been limited explored. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between two types of open innovation and organizational resilience and the mediating effect of intellectual capital on open innovation and organizational resilience.

After a literature review, a research model including open innovation, intellectual capital and organizational resilience is proposed. Survey data are collected from information and communication technologies (ICT) sector in China and analyzed by using partial least squares–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and Bootstrapping procedure to present results of each hypothesis test.

Results indicate that inbound open innovation has a significant and direct impact on organizational resilience, while outbound open innovation has not. In addition, all three dimensions of intellectual capital were significantly correlated with organizational resilience and had mediating roles in the indirect effect of inbound open innovation and organizational resilience. Nevertheless, only social capital played a mediating role in the relationship between outbound open innovation and organizational resilience.

The study explores the relationships among open innovation, intellectual capital and organizational resilience in a comprehensive model, which is the first known study to highlight that open innovation can enhance organizational resilience through intellectual capital, and provides valuable suggestions for improving organizational resilience.

The relationship between corporate culture and inbound open innovation (OI) has been limited to two sub-constructs: a culture for openness and an innovation culture, but until now a richer conceptualization of corporate culture is missing.

The authors apply Quinn and Rohrbaugh's (1983) competing values framework and regress these together with company internal and external control variables on five measures of inbound OI, reflecting product innovation, process innovation and the sourcing of innovation activities. The authors use data from a survey of more than 250 Swiss companies, primarily SMEs.

The importance of the firms' market environments suggests that the results are affected by the specific situation in which the firms found themselves at the time of the survey: after a strong currency shock, inbound OI activities seem to be a reaction to external pressure that favored planning and rule-oriented (formal) cultures to implement cost-cutting process innovations.

Companies should develop a vision and a strategy, ensure open and transparent communication, have suitable reward and support mechanisms in place, adjust structures and processes, and institutionalize and formalize any change whenever they are confronted with a situation that requires a quick reaction and an adjustment to their degree of openness.

The paper clarifies the relationship between cultural traits and inbound OI, using a well-established understanding of corporate culture and differentiating between innovation types. It points to the importance of the external environment in order to understand the role of culture.

Studies concentrating on digitalization and interconnected capabilities have increased over the past several decades. Digitalization capability and open innovation are perceived as sources of sustained competitiveness across disciplines. This study investigated how digitalization capability and coopetition strategy affect the sustainable performance of firms by exploring the role of internal and external factors in influencing the adoption and success of open innovation in emerging markets.

To test the hypothesis, the authors conducted a structural equation model analysis on 509 firm datasets from the hub cities in China, an innovative battlefield where multilateral cooperation and competition are interwoven for globalization, clean development and the enhancement of economic growth.

The authors found that a firm's digitalization capability positively impacts outbound/inbound open innovation, coopetition strategy and sustainable performance. This study’s results support a series of mediating effects through outbound/inbound open innovation and coopetition strategy. Also, it provides a nuanced understanding of how digitalization capability and open innovation can affect sustainable performance in emerging markets.

The present study provides a nuanced understanding of how digitalization capability and in/out-bound open innovation can affect sustainable performance in emerging markets. The authors believe this model contributes to current knowledge by filling several research gaps, and this study’s findings offer valuable and practical implications for achieving open innovation and creating sustainable performance.

As a key driver of organizational agility, open innovation allows for improving time-to-market and complexity, which are the mechanisms that most significantly lower the risk of knowledge expropriation in emerging markets. For this reason, there is concern about the negative impacts of hiding knowledge in the context of inter-organizational collaborative work. Therefore, the research goal is to analyze the moderating effect of the three types of knowledge hiding (playing dumb, evasive hiding and rationalized hiding) on the relationship between open innovation (both inbound and outbound) and agility.

The research model was tested with survey data from a sample of 248 companies located in an emerging country, mostly from sectors of high turbulence in demand and technology.

None of the three types of knowledge hiding has a negative effect on the relationship between open innovation and agility. Surprisingly, evasive hiding has a positive and significant effect, specifically on the relationship between inbound open innovation and agility.

The study contributes to the discussion on the contradictory influence of knowledge hiding. Although the presence of knowledge hiding in business relationships with their external partners is undeniable, this research makes clear that, when faced with the particular need to be agile, businesses recognize that the benefits of open innovation in terms of time-to-market improvement and complexity outweigh the protectionism underlying hiding. Moreover, the study results suggest evasive hiding is essential for the inbound process to use time effectively and avoid wasting it in discussions that do not promote agility.

Through empirical research, this study aims to explore the role of competition and cooperation in coupling open innovation (OI).

In this study, the hierarchical regression analysis method was used to test each hypothesis.

Cooperation has an inverted U-shaped moderating effect between coupling OI and innovation performance. Competition negatively moderates the relationship between inbound-oriented coupling OI and innovation performance, and has an inverted U-shaped moderating effect between outbound-oriented coupling OI and innovation performance. When competition and cooperation coexist, competition will passivate the moderating effect of cooperation between inbound-oriented coupling OI and innovation performance, and sharpen the moderating effect of cooperation between outbound-oriented coupling OI and innovation performance.

The role of competition and cooperation on different types of coupled innovation is studied for the first time. This research greatly enriches the theory of the effect of innovation network on innovation performance.

This study aims to analyze the effects of the components of absorptive capacity (ACAP) – potential absorptive capacity (PACAP) and realized absorptive capacity (RACAP) on inbound and outbound open innovation (OI). In addition, this study investigates the moderating role that knowledge-oriented leadership (KOL) plays in the relationship between ACAP and OI.

This research adopts a quantitative approach, using structural equation modeling, in a sample of 218 companies in the Brazilian manufacturing sector, using a random sampling technique and self-administered questionnaire.

The results indicate that while PACAP positively influences inbound and outbound OI, RACAP has a significant relationship only with outbound OI. In addition, KOL moderates the significant relationships between PACAP and RACAP and OI, indicating that the development of a leadership that fosters learning and interaction between employees and sectors of the organization impacts the innovation results of companies in the manufacturing sector.

This study also shows that managers must have an active role in the construction of an organizational context that supports learning through initiatives that encourage the process of trial and error, teamwork and cooperation between employees.

This research advances previous studies by relating the two components of ACAP (PACAP and RACAP) with the two OI models (inbound and outbound), in addition to analyzing the moderating role that KOL plays in this relationship between ACAP and OI.

The aim of the paper is to analyze how actors in foodservice companies organize for inbound open innovation (OI).

This paper conducted a case analysis of a large and successful foodservice company operating in the Dutch market. Furthermore, drawing on 18 interviews and archive data, we identified the main organizational practices involved in the implementation of inbound innovation activities and the ways they are embraced are defined.

The results provide a holistic view of the main organizational practices a foodservice company implemented at different organizational levels, to exploit external knowledge coming from third parties and to promote the sharing and recombination of knowledge resources within the organization. The identified organizational practices reveal the main interaction patterns between relevant internal actors and other external parties in the company network, as well as between actors on different hierarchical organizational levels which allows processing relevant innovation information and make relevant decisions about it.

Implications are provided in terms of both theory and practice. This paper helps foodservice companies to create an internal organizational environment that supports the exploitation of customer knowledge.

There are few studies on how companies organize themselves for OI in general, and especially in the foodservice sector.

This paper aims to contribute to overcoming the gap existing in the supply chain literature related to digital servitization by bridging digital servitization with knowledge management and identifying the rise of digital knowledge servitization as a driver for changes in the supply chain business model towards open innovation.

The study follows an inductive grounded theory approach for theory building. To analyse the impact of digital knowledge servitization, in-depth interviews of managers in the main business units of the Volvo Group supply chain ecosystem were carried out.

The results show how the digital servitization process affects the supply chain business model, highlighting the central role of knowledge in the service ecosystem and the rise of the theoretical concept of digital knowledge servitization. In particular, through the Innovation Lab (Volvo Group) study, the paper contributes to bringing together the theoretical knowledge-based view of servitization with the digital servitization concept, which demonstrates the role of this combined perspective in the transformation of the supply chain; this is carried out by introducing a new business model based on open innovation in inbound and outbound processes.

The research offers interesting insights from a managerial perspective, as increasingly advanced and complex digital solutions require shorter times in supply chain management (SCM). Companies need to be able to quickly manage information and knowledge flows deriving from internal and external interactions and involvement with external actors upstream and downstream of the supply chain ecosystem. Therefore, the digital knowledge servitization of the supply chain also highlights implications for managers in terms of human resources management.

The novel research goal is to contribute to the supply chain literature by integrating the digital servitization with the knowledge view and analysing the impact on the inbound and outbound supply chain through the introduction of an open innovation business model.

This study aims to examine the relationships between organizational learning capabilities, open innovation and firm performance (FP) in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the emerging economies.

Data collected from 384 manufacturing SMEs operating across the seven emirates of the UAE were statistically analyzed using SmartPLS 3 to examine the hypotheses of this study.

The results show that organizational learning capabilities positively influences both inbound and outbound dimensions of open innovation (OI). Inbound open innovation (IP) practice positively impacted both market effectiveness and profitability, while outbound open innovation (OP) practice only affected profitability. Findings further confirmed the mediating role of IP practice on the relationships of organizational learning capabilities with market effectiveness and profitability. In contrast, OP practice did not mediate the relationships of organizational learning capabilities with market effectiveness and profitability.

To the best of the authors knowledge, this is among the first study contributing to the extant innovation literature in terms of investigations into the significant and complex interrelations of organizational learning capabilities, OI and FP in a single study, demonstrating various theoretical implications in the context of manufacturing SMEs in emerging countries. Overall, the findings of this study confirmed that the owners/managers of the UAE’s manufacturing SMEs need to be acquainted with the need of creating a working environment fostering organizational learning processes and capabilities to enhance IP and OP activities, thereby improving their market effectiveness and profitability.