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The purpose of this paper is to connect open innovation and entrepreneurship literature by focusing on the influence of entrepreneurs’ open innovation mindset and alertness on a firm’s financial performance in a country that has recently transitioned from socialism into capitalism.

The study is based on a sample of 188 entrepreneurs who answered a survey about their personality characteristics in Time 1. In time 2, the authors collected firm-related data from a national database on firms’ financial statements.

The results show that an individual’s level of open innovation mindset has a positive impact on entrepreneurial alertness. The results also show an important and previously under-investigated relationship between entrepreneurial alertness and firm financial performance.

This study spurs research in the field of open innovation on the individual level of the entrepreneurs who have considerable influence on small firms’ results, and draws attention into the under-investigated innovation and entrepreneurship agenda in a small and transitioning country.

Open innovation starts with an open innovation mindset of entrepreneurs, so entrepreneurs are those who set the open innovation path of firms.

While open innovation triggered interest among business practitioners and management innovation scholars, it remained focused on management topics connected to a broad strategic setting of a firm. However, research related to entrepreneurial companies which benefit significantly from external sources of innovation has received scarce attention, and open innovation on the entrepreneur’s individual level even less so.

The purpose of this research is to better understand the human aspects of open innovation in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by exploring how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation influence enjoyment in helping others, knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding and consequently firms' open innovation.

We collected data with a survey among CEOs in 140 SMEs and performed confirmatory factor analysis applying structural equation modeling in IBM SPSS AMOS (v. 26).

Results reveal that intrinsic motivation is positively associated with helping behavior and knowledge sharing and negatively associated with knowledge hiding. We also confirm the positive relationship between extrinsic motivation and knowledge sharing. Moreover, we find that knowledge sharing increases and knowledge hiding decreases the firm-level open innovation. Especially in high-tech industry, knowledge sharing is a vital determinant of open innovation.

Responding to the calls for a deeper understanding of the individual-level factors that determine organization-level open innovation, in this research we focus on the human aspect of open innovation in SMEs. Open innovation is a widely recognized and implemented concept among large corporations and facilitates better understanding of new technological and market developments both within and outside of organizations. However, understanding of the microfoundations of open innovation in smaller firms is still limited, but this steam of research is growing rapidly.

Since the first definition of open innovation (OI), the indivisible relationship between this concept and entrepreneurship was undeniable. However, the exact mechanisms by which an entrepreneurial approach may benefit OI processes and vice versa are not yet fully understood. The study aims to offer an accurate map of the knowledge evolution of the OI–entrepreneurship relationship and interesting gaps to be filled in the future.

The study adopted a bibliometric analysis, coupled with a systematic literature review performed over a data set of 106 peer-reviewed articles published from 2005 to 2020 to identify thematic clusters.

The results show five thematic clusters: entrepreneurial opportunities, organisational opportunities, strategic partnership opportunities, institutional opportunities and digital opportunities for OI. Investigating each of them, the authors created a framework that highlights future avenues for further developing the topic.

This study is the first of its kind to systematise, analyse and critically interpret the literature concerned with the topic of the OI–entrepreneurship.