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Openness to external knowledge has recently gained popularity as a means for firms to complement and leverage internal knowledge in the pursuit of innovation outcomes. However, conflicting evidence exists regarding the role of openness in external knowledge acquisition. This paper aims to propose that openness to external knowledge has a nonlinear effect on innovation performance and that this nonlinear relationship is contingent on an ambidextrous knowledge search strategy.

Based on original large-scale survey of 246 interfirm collaborations in the high-technology industry, it is found that the impact of openness to external knowledge on innovation performance exhibits an inverted-U shape and that this relationship is affected by an ambidextrous knowledge search strategy.

The results indicate that an ambidextrous knowledge strategy that addresses the depth and breadth of external knowledge significantly influences a firm’s ability to derive benefits from increased openness to external knowledge. Empirically, the authors provide an original contribution to high-technology firms by exploring how and why an ambidextrous knowledge strategy can be a critical catalyst spurring innovation performance.

The research scope is limited to a single industry. Further research could extend the theoretical framework to multiple industries, which may increase the likelihood of innovation theory development.

The results suggest that firms opening up the boundaries of their innovation activity to engage in external knowledge are able to leverage their in-house innovation to enhance their innovation performance. The authors advocate that in innovation management domains, greater emphasis is needed on how openness to external knowledge has more positive impacts not only on innovation performance but also on innovation implemented management.

This study is among the first to investigate the ambidextrous knowledge search effect on the external knowledge of high-technology firms. This paper contributes to the theoretical and practical literature concerning openness innovation and knowledge management by reflecting on the ambidextrous knowledge search strategy.

This paper aims to explore the impact of enterprise niche on dual innovation performance and the moderating role of innovation openness on the relationship between enterprise niche and dual innovation performance.

This study uses the panel data of the enterprise technology patents of China's Top 100 Electronic Information Enterprises from 2009 to 2018. Multiple regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Niche width has a significant positive impact on exploitative and exploratory innovation performance. Niche overlap has an inverted U-shaped effect on exploitative innovation performance and significantly positively affects exploratory innovation performance. Innovation openness negatively moderates the impact of niche width on exploitative innovation performance and positively moderates the impact of niche overlap on exploitative innovation performance.

This study provides new insights into the effects of enterprise niche on dual innovation performance by showing the moderating role of innovation openness. The study finds a strategic logic of moderate niche overlap, clarifies the innovative effect of different innovation openness modes and reveals the construction and management mechanisms of enterprise niche and innovation openness strategy.

This paper aims to explore the role and meaning of openness for the purpose of enhancing the understanding of collaborative innovation from an industrial network perspective.

The theoretical framework is based on the Industrial Network Approach, and the concepts of activity links, resource ties and actor bonds are used as a starting point for capturing the content and dynamics of the interaction. The empirical part consists of five case studies: two historical and three contemporary cases dealing with collaborative innovation projects. The cases are analyzed with regard to openness in business relationships and their connections in the network.

The main contribution is a conceptualization of openness in business relationships and relationship connections. The paper describes various forms and contents of openness – and closeness. It is postulated that the concept of openness can be used as an analytical tool for digging deeper into relationship and network-related issues of relevance to firms’ behavior in the context of collaborative innovation. Openness, as it is defined in this paper, is also put forward as an explanation of why (or why not) collaborative innovation projects become successful.

The conceptualization of openness differs from openness as it is commonly described in the open innovation literature. There, openness is the opposite of closeness, that is, a pattern where the innovation activities take place internally within the company. In this paper, openness, instead, has to do with how firms interact with other network actors in the context of collaborative innovation.

Technology has been central and has made service innovations technically feasible and economically viable. Top management support, however, plays an important role in shaping a firm’s service innovation-related strategies and decisions. This study aims to propose a theoretical framework that delineates the relationships among openness of technology adoption, top management support and service innovation within social innovation context.

This study obtained the data through a survey of 176 information technology (IT) firms in Taiwan; IT managers were selected as the data collection sources. A partial least squares analysis was used to address sophisticated data analysis issues.

The empirical evidence indicates that openness of technology adoption enhances service innovation within social innovation context. Furthermore, top management support facilitates the relationship between openness of technology adoption and service innovation.

The openness of technology adoption captures the interactions among top management support in shaping service innovation. Researchers should examine the nature of open technology infrastructure that will foster such service innovation from social innovation perspective.

The detailed findings offer practical suggestions for firms that are compelling to invest in advanced open technologies, giving opportunities for service innovation, solving social problems and meeting the new societal challenges. Additionally, firms may foster their top management’s positive intention to support service innovation by pre-planned support activities, such as allocating sufficient new service resources and qualified support technicians.

This study contributes to the evolving literature on the social innovation, service-dominant logic, and contingency theory. This analysis suggests that these perspectives offer a potentially useful view for integrating insights from different literature streams (e.g. openness, social innovation, service innovation, top management support and technology management) by examining them through a different conceptual lens, thus reinforcing existing findings.

Prior research on open innovation has not investigated changes in knowledge acquisition strategies of firms over time overlooking how learning from past knowledge acquisition can change subsequent search strategies. Also, prior research has focused principally on product innovation overlooking process innovation. The purpose of the paper is to introduce the concept of dynamic openness, which is defined as temporal changes in external knowledge search strategy. We explore four dynamic openness strategies – closing down, opening up, persistent open and persistent closed – and examine the impact of these strategies on both product and process innovation.

The authors used a panel dataset of 16,021 firms based on five waves (2009–2017) of the UK Community Innovation Survey (UKIS). All models are estimated using firm and year fixed effects (FE) method to control for endogeneity that arises from unobserved heterogeneity. Endogeneity and robustness tests were carried out to ensure the validity of results.

The results show that firms do use dynamic openness strategies over time leveraging learning from past searches. Specifically, the study indicates that closing down is not an effective strategy for either type of innovation. For process innovation, firms should pursue opening up strategy rather than persistent open strategy, whereas for product innovation firms could pursue either strategy, highlighting important contextual differences.

The paper contributes to the literature on knowledge acquisition in open innovation: (1) by theorizing the underlying reasons – learning from past collaborations, absorptive capacity and external knowledge heterogeneity – why firms pursue one dynamic openness strategy over another and (2) by extending literature by delineating the dynamic openness strategies that firms should pursue in process innovation vs product innovation.

Intellectual property protection mechanisms (IPPMs) include a variety of methods suitable for protecting valuable intangible assets of companies, and it is of great relevance to study how companies use these mechanisms to ensure the appropriability of innovation, in a context in which innovation is increasingly open. Indeed, there is a tension between the aim to share knowledge with external partners and the need to protect valuable know-how. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship among the use of IPPMs, open innovation (OI), and the innovation performance of companies.

The study is based upon a survey conducted on 477 firms from Finland, Italy, Sweden, and UK in 2012.

The study shows that IPPMs have an indirect impact on innovation performance, mediated by the degree of openness. More precisely, IPPMs positively influence the level of openness, which, in turn, positively influences the innovation performance.

The empirical analysis contributes on two issues widely debated in the literature: the impact of IPPMs on innovation performance and the role of IPPMs as enablers or disablers of OI.

This research helps firms pursue an open innovation strategy but want to minimize competitive pressure from other external entities. A theoretical framework is constructed to analyze the impact of openness on innovation performance, exploring different effect of firms' external search channels.

This paper employs a stepwise hierarchical regression approach to assess the effect of openness on technological innovation considering the role of information technology adoption and political ties. The effect is conducted using a large-scale sample of 1,073 Chinese manufacturing firms over the period 2011–2013 as empirical research objects.

There are two stages of the open technological innovation process while the information technology (IT) adoption and political ties are the key consideration in emerging markets. Openness is curvilinearly (taking an inverted U-shape) related to innovation performance. Both information technology adoption and political ties generally help firms to turn broadly sourced external knowledge into technological innovation performance. This will stimulate “one plus one is greater than two” effect not only in the process of achieving performance goals, but also in the process of technological innovation.

This quantitative research illustrates the importance relationship between firms' open behaviors and technological innovation performance in emerging markets. It helps us understand firms' current constrains of open strategy of technological innovation and helps domestic or foreign investors to make strategic collaboration choices in emerging economies according to the degree of openness, informatization level, political connections, which is equally important for research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the following two questions: What are the influences of the top managers’ different leadership styles on organizational innovation? What is the mechanism by which the different leaderships exert different effects on organizational innovation?

To test the hypothesized model, a data set based on 133 MBA part-time students from Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University in China was built, after interviewing several top managers as a pilot study. With the help of SPSS macro, hierarchical regression and bootstrapping analysis, the paper analyzes the effects of two leadership styles on innovation performance, through the mediation mechanism of openness involving open breadth and open depth.

The results indicate that transformational leadership enhances, while transactional leadership reduces, the organizational innovation performance. The openness breadth and openness depth not only mediate the beneficial effect of transformational leadership on innovation, but also mediate the deleterious effect of transactional leadership on innovation.

This study empirically explores the different functions of transformational leadership and transactional leadership for leading organizational innovation performance. Furthermore, a new form of organization is an open design or strategy that allows more external knowledge and resources to be absorbed, which is claimed as a new paradigm for organization innovation. This study integrates the concepts of breadth of openness and depth of openness on the basis of open innovation literature, as an intermediate mechanism to explain the different effects of the two forms of top managers’ leadership.

This study aims to examine open innovation that consists a wide range of external knowledge search activities, such external search breadth and depth, external R&D, cooperation and acquisition activities, as a response to different innovation barriers faced by Indonesian firms.

Data are derived from Indonesia innovation survey. Exploratory factor analysis is used to identify and combine innovation barriers variables. Ordered logistic estimation is used to measure the impact of innovation barriers on firm openness decision. Logistic regression is used to measure the impact of innovation barriers on firm openness indicators such as external R&D, cooperation and acquisition as the variables are binary. Finally, Tobit regression is used to measure the impact of firm openness decision on innovation performance.

The main findings indicate that different barriers to innovation lead to different firms’ openness decisions, and different decisions on openness have differentiated influence on innovation performance.

This study contributes to the innovation barrier literature by empirically testing whether experiencing barriers to innovation is associated with a broader external knowledge search activity. Previous studies tend to link innovation barriers with a narrow activity as indicated by external knowledge searching widely and deeply.

Focusing on some relevant constructs defined by the open innovation (OI) literature (i.e. determinants of openness; openness choices operationalized in terms of collaboration depth with scientific and business partners; organizational and social context; innovation performance in terms of novelty and efficiency), this paper investigates the relationships among such constructs. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to empirically analyse two types of relationships: between some contextual factors and firms’ openness choices; and among openness choices, a set of organizational-managerial and social factors, and OI performance outcomes.

The authors carried out a theory testing survey, involving four European countries (Finland, Italy, Sweden and the UK). The authors applied descriptive statistics and a series of regressions.

The authors analysed the impact exerted by external and internal variables on the collaboration depth with scientific and business partners: technological trends are relevant to move firms towards external collaborations, with both types of partners; efficiency goals pursued in collaborations are related to the collaboration depth with both types of partners, while an aggressive innovation strategy is positively related only to scientific-partner depth. Besides, collaboration depths with both partners are positively related to the both sides of innovation performance (i.e. novelty and efficiency), but the organizational-managerial and social contexts emerge as relevant mediator variables. Organizational-managerial and external relational social capital exert a beneficial role on the both types of innovation performance, while internal relational social capital benefits only novelty.

The work shows important limitations such as the low level of the explanatory values in the regression models. Therefore, the results must be considered as preliminary explorative insights that may be useful to encourage further studies.

This work serves to raise managers’ awareness on the opportunity of developing organizational-managerial mechanisms, as well as on the importance of social capital to profit from collaborations.

Although during the last decade many researchers have claimed that we are in the era of OI, empirical works, which provide both a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of the phenomenon, are still few. Moreover, the specific action of the context (managerial, organizational and social) as possible mediator of the performance outcomes of openness is empirically under-studied. The authors’ work attempts to fulfil these gaps.