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Innovation challenges are increasingly complex, cutting across distributed actors from different disciplines, organizations, and fields. Solving such challenges requires creating the capacities of opening up for innovation to access and develop a greater amount and variety of knowledge and resources. Perspectives on open source, open innovation, and interorganizational collaboration have explored such capacities, but from different origins and scopes of analysis. Our practice-based integrative framework of “opening innovation” helps highlight these differences and connect their relative strengths. Through a critical literature review paired with an analysis of different empirical cases from Hacking Health, a non-profit organization helping drive digital health innovation, the authors reveal the user-centric, firm-centric, and field-centric approaches to opening innovation that progressively connect a greater variety of actors and resources. The authors show how specific new relational practices they produce address the new relational dynamics these connections bring to accumulate more resources for innovation to keep progressing.

Despite the importance of top management team (TMT) gender diversity in a firm's strategic decisions and the high degree of innovation activities that several firms have experienced in recent years, little or no research has examined how TMT gender diversity affects a firm's open innovation decision. The authors examine how TMT gender diversity impacts firms' open innovation activities. The authors further examine how this impact is affected by women executives' personal attributes and institutional conditions.

The sample comprised of 62,745 firm-year observations (9,831 firms) from 25 countries from 1990 to 2010. The authors employed the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique to estimate the results.

Employing novel panel data on co-owned patents across 25 economies, the authors find that proportion of women in TMTs has a positive impact on open innovation activities. Moreover, the authors find that women managers' power and institutional gender parity strengthen the association between gender diversity and open innovation.

The findings of this study indicate that firms committed to optimizing their open innovation policies and practices should include women in TMTs and create such conditions that are supportive for women executives to effectively express their innate inclinations. Importantly, our study supports the business case for gender diversity in top leadership positions by providing a compelling evidence for the positive impact of TMT gender diversity on open innovation.

This study contributes to the gender diversity literature by showing how women leaders' values and character become embedded in their companies' strategy and present empirical evidence that having women in TMTs increase the likelihood of conducting open innovation. Further, the authors show how women executives' power and institutional level gender parity provide boundary conditions that moderate the relationship between TMT gender diversity and open innovation.

Prior research has reported the indirect implications of firm's dynamic capabilities on their competitive firm performance. Our attention now turns to open innovation since it has been confirmed to be an influential factor contributing to the superior performance of technological firms. So far there has been little research on assessing the relationship between a firm's dynamic capabilities as an antecedent of the competitive performance of the firm or investigations into the mediating role of open innovation in this relationship.

Drawing on the theory of dynamic capabilities, we developed a framework as a way to better understand the role of open innovation, which could then help to better explain the relationship between firms' dynamics capabilities and their competitive firm performance. Based on the empirical data of 465 firms operating in innovative and non-innovative industries, we employed structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine the research hypotheses and the path relationships in the proposed model.

The SEM analysis revealed that a firm's dynamic capabilities significantly impact its open innovation performance and that open innovation, consequently, impacts the competitive performance of the firm. Moreover, the results show that the path between dynamic capabilities and competitive firm performance is partially mediated through open innovation.

The findings provide practical implications and draw managerial attention to the importance of: (1) investing in innovation, (2) engaging customers in the innovation process and (3) maintaining innovation management excellence as significant antecedent factors in increasing competitive firm performance.

Considering the lack of empirical research in the literature on the links between dynamic capabilities and open innovation, this paper contributes to the dynamic capabilities and open innovation literature by confirming that open innovation not only mediates the relationship between these two aspects but also strengthens the effect the dynamic capabilities have on competitive firm performance. Besides, due to the significant impact of dynamic capabilities on open innovation, dynamic capabilities might be regarded as an antecedent of open innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of open innovation practices on the innovation capability and export performance of UK small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).

The empirical (quantitative) investigation is based on a sample of 64 SMEs in the UK – 33 “open” innovation firms and 31 “closed” innovation firms.

The overall results demonstrate that the international competitiveness of SMEs is highly dependent on the cumulative effects and interrelationship between two key internal components, i.e. R&D capacity and managerial structure and competencies, coupled with two external factors, i.e. open innovation practices and the ability of the firm to attract government grants for R&D and technological development.

Owing to the size of the sample, it has not been possible to undertake research within the context of specific regional disparities and/or sectoral characteristics.

In order to achieve and sustain competitive advantage in today's global market, SMEs need to collaborate with universities and other firms to advance and commercialise their technologies through “open innovation”.

Results show that open innovation activities and their impact on the international competitiveness of SMEs are complex and multi‐faceted. Essentially, they are highly related to and dependent upon the cumulative effects of, and interrelationship between, several key internal and external factors. Such factors cannot be fully explored through qualitative approaches as they require more complex and rigorous statistical analyses.

This study aims to assess how firm functional capability moderates the relationship between two types of open innovation and performance, with a special focus on the role of technological capability and the join effect market information management capability. This paper develops and tests a research model, which assesses how the performance implications of two open innovation forms are shaped by the technological capability and how such an effect is contingent on market information management capability.

Survey data were collected from 238 Chinese high-tech enterprises. Structural equation modeling and linear regression were used to test the data. Then, the main research questions were answered.

Empirically results show that technological capability strengthens the influence of inbound open innovation on firm performance. However, the moderate effect of technological capability on the relationship between outbound open innovation and firm performance remains unsupported. A higher technological capability with a high level of market information management capability increases the efficacy of outbound open innovation in gaining superior performance. Additional analysis shows that when firms implement inbound activities and possess a strong technological capability, they will achieve higher performance if they possess a moderate level of market information management capability, compared with a high or low level.

This paper provides new evidence on the benefits of different open innovation strategies on firm’s performance and, more importantly, the specific firm-level contingencies (technological capability and market information management capability) under which these benefits are more likely to be enhanced. It clarifies what the capabilities are and how they interact to foster the robust open innovation strategies, which sheds new light on the boundary conditions that affect the open innovations–firm performance relationship.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the spatial organisation of the open innovation model in the wine industry in Canada.

The paper employs a micro‐firm level survey among 146 wine firms in Canada. Descriptive and non‐parametric tests are used in the analysis.

The results on the occurrence of collaborations depict modest collaborative activities with external sources. Most of the collaborations and information are sourced locally because the local climate and growing conditions are so specific that alternative sources and collaborations are less relevant. The results also show that the firm's openness strategy has a weak influence on innovation capacity but firms that introduce more innovations are those that embrace an open innovation strategy to a greater extent than the less innovative.

The number of respondents is still limited (i.e. about 150). Moreover, only the relationship between some firm‐specific factors related to innovation and the degree of openness is studied.

The paper provides managerial implications because it suggests that firms adopting an open innovation strategy through collaborations have a higher impact on innovation development by means of introducing new types of innovation and on R&D activities.

The paper introduces the spatial dimension of the open innovation strategy in the wine industry in order to understand the link between the geographically‐dispersed open innovation networks and their impacts on innovation capacities and innovation development of winery firms.

Interorganizational reciprocity plays a key role in relationships among software firms and open source communities. This study seeks to illuminate how a firm's open source strategy, characterized by its participation in the open source community, contributes to its financial performance.

Based on the norm of reciprocity and social capital theory, the study proposes a model comprising the behavioral antecedents and business results of a firm's symbiotic relationship with the open source community. Data were collected through a survey. Partial least squares-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to assess the results.

A firm's participative behaviors can have three dimensions: technology giving, technology taking and social participation. Technology taking directly impacts financial performance, whereas the effects of technology giving and social participation on financial performance are fully mediated by the firm's symbiotic relationship with the open source community.

Managers can understand how a specific behavior ultimately contributes to a symbiotic relationship or a firm's financial performance and how to flexibly align participation strategies with the business orientation.

The study adds to the open source literature by refining and enriching the conceptual domain of a firm's participative behaviors in open source communities. It also reveals how contrasting behavioral strategies impact a firm's financial performance.

This study aims to analyze the influence of inbound and outbound open innovation practices on firm performance among Indian product small and medium-sized enterprises.

A cross-sectional design with a quantitative approach is adopted. The data is collected from 213 decision-makers of software product firms through an online survey using the criteria-based snowball sampling method. The data is processed in IBM SPSS 23.0 and analyzed using multiple regression.

Collaboration with customers and purchasing intellectual property rights (IPR) are the key inbound practices that positively influence firm performance. Outbound innovation practices such as selling out IPR and spin-off influence firm performance negatively and positively, respectively. Inbound open innovation practice such as trade show participation helps in product development and outbound open innovation practice such as spin-off helps in product development.

The study analyses the influences of inbound and outbound open innovation practices on firm performance among software product firms in emerging economies. The research outcomes have vast implications for theory and practitioners.