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Absorptive capacity, technological collaboration and servitization are analyzed to establish ways to overcome the balance between products and services in manufacturing companies. A fresh perspective is introduced by presenting a framework for innovation strategy, moving beyond product-based R&D.

The hypotheses are tested using data on Spanish firms in the high-tech chemical and pharmaceutical industries through ordinary least squares regression analysis. The sample consists of 112 manufacturing firms included in the Spanish Survey of Business Strategies.

The results show that absorptive capacity facilitates servitization and that technological collaboration moderates the relationship between absorptive capacity and servitization. The synergies between absorptive capacity and technological collaboration for servitization are recognized from the perspective of open innovation as a way of resolving the trade-off between products and services.

Future research should introduce more sources of collaboration by broadening the value chain perspective. Other approaches to innovation may also be considered, including relationships to process innovation.

The results can provide meaningful guidance for companies to determine the key opportunities of servitization driven by absorptive capacity, and the best ways to leverage open innovation and collaboration strategies to exploit such approaches.

This research enriches theories on servitization, open innovation and innovative behavior. Open innovation strategy should be linked to greater servitization activity and should support an open service strategy. This approach is crucial for building innovation capabilities through technological collaboration.

In the ever-increasing dynamics of global business markets, firms must use all possible sources to innovate continually. This study aims to explore how supply chain innovation can be fostered through joint efforts between firms and their supply chain partners.

At least two areas advocate innovation through external relations, namely, supply chain collaboration and open innovation. This study aims to provide a holistic insight into how vertical and horizontal partnerships can be implemented to help supply chains become more innovative, building upon commonalities and differences between the two areas.

This study proposes a conceptual framework for supply chain innovation based on the following three ambidextrous capabilities: purpose (i.e. knowledge exploration and exploitation), span (horizontal and vertical collaboration) and orientation (i.e. incremental and radical innovation). With five propositions, the link between the three ambidextrous capabilities and supply chain innovation is explained. The implementation of the framework is articulated through an illustrative real-life case.

The concept of open innovation in supply chain settings is progressively essential yet under-researched. This study is an early attempt to draw on the available theories and literature on open innovation and supply chain collaboration and elaborates how supply chains can facilitate and adopt a more open approach toward innovation.

Open innovation is important for technology firms as they can use freely available resources to source creative and innovative ideas. Despite the usefulness of open innovation for technological advancements, few studies have focused on the role of cybercrime in affecting an organizations strategic direction. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of open innovation on cybercrime in technology firms.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted on technology firms to understand the role of open innovation in terms of technology scouting, horizontal collaboration and vertical collaboration on cybercrime activity.

The study found that there is a dilemma most technology firm’s face in having an open innovation strategy and how to manage cybercrime. This means that a coopetition strategy is utilized that helps to not only balance the need to have open innovation but also protect intellectual property.

The study has implications for emerging technology innovations that not only need to have cyber security but also harness the use of Big Data.

Managers of technology firms need to encourage open innovation as a strategy but manage the cybercrime that comes from sharing too much information in an online context.

This paper is one of the first to link open innovation strategy to cybercrime activity in technology firms. Thus, it contributes to the literature on open innovation and cyber theft and security.

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.

This chapter asks how we can understand the managerial practices in open innovation, a recently popularized way of organizing innovative work. Open innovation implies opening up the borders of the organization, creating a context where conventional steering and managerial tools no longer apply. Utilizing a collaborative research approach, following an open innovation collaboration over 8 years, this chapter outlines the managerial practices that direct the collaboration. These practices are important for meaning making and identity creation in the collaboration and can be understood as a form of authorship, a continuous intervention strategy to manage, develop and change the organizational context.

This study aims to explore how and when learning from others promotes creative performance over the contributor’s tenure in the context of open innovation communities.

The authors analyze a publicly available data set that includes 25,923 innovative items developed by 2,194 contributors from an open innovation community of an online game spanning eight years. Logistic regression model is used for analyzing the data.

The results show that multicultural experiences are negatively related to contributor’s creative performance, and this negative relationship weakens as contributor’s tenure increases. While diverse skills are positively related to contributor’s creative performance, and this positive relationship strengthens as contributor’s tenure increases.

This research highlights the importance of online team collaboration in knowledge transfer through learning from others in open innovation communities. By identifying two outcomes of learning from others through online team collaboration, the authors demonstrate the double-edged role of learning from others and advance the understanding on how the effect of learning from others varies over the contributor’s tenure. These results expand the understanding of online team collaboration and provide a new perspective for research on learning from others.

In recent years, companies have started to open up their Research and Development (R&D) and their innovation activities to external partners. They aim to access new resources and capabilities and to gain shorter time-to-markets. However, as several studies have shown, it can be difficult to manage collaborative (open) innovation projects to achieve desired outcomes. Starting from this premise, the paper investigates how project stakeholder management is different in open innovation projects from traditional R&D projects.

The study has a qualitative nature and is based on the interpretative paradigm with an inductive orientation. The paper leverages interviews with experts involved in open innovation projects conducted in two Science and Technology Parks between Sweden and Italy.

The analysis shows how companies manage multiple stakeholders in open innovation projects and the peculiarities project stakeholder management faces in these projects when compared with traditional R&D projects. The paper shows how the relationships with external partners in open innovation projects are regulated by informal identification and analysis frameworks, which reduce the tensions deriving from these multiple collaborations. In addition, it underlines a set of good practices, and project management aspects for developing effective absorptive capacity of know-how, resources, and capabilities from external stakeholders in open innovation projects.

The paper analyzes for the first time how companies manage multiple stakeholders in open innovation projects in a different way from traditional R&D projects. Furthermore, the paper introduces a shift in the focus of the analysis: it focuses on the level of the project conducted through multiple collaborations instead of on the level of the firms involved in the project. Finally, the paper integrates open innovation research with project management research.

This study examines how technology-intensive small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engage in open innovation. The purpose of this paper is to add to the literature on open innovation in SMEs, which has received considerably less attention than open innovation in large companies. Also, the study adds on the literature on open innovation in the commercialization phase.

A multiple case study of 13 technology-intensive SMEs in forestry sector was conducted. The forestry sector in Finland was chosen as a target context, there were many innovative pioneering SMEs operating in the industry and because the sector was going through significant changes.

Three multi-firm collaboration modes in the commercialization phase were identified: networks with a lead partner, equal partnership, and partnership for external technology commercialization. The study shows that in SMEs, open innovation is used for commercialization rather than research and development. The main conclusion of the study is that the mode of collaboration in commercialization is determined by the core competence of the firm and the strategy for open innovation.

The study results imply that SMEs benefit from opening up their innovation process in the commercialization phase. The firms in this study employed a blend of strategies that capitalized on their internal strengths. They collaborated actively with external firms and outsourced from specialists. This way they were able to compensate for their internal weaknesses and gain competitive advantage.

The study extends our understanding of open innovation by providing a detailed analysis of how open innovation takes place in the commercialization phase of innovation process. Also, the study extends understanding of the strategic use of open innovation in SMEs by showing how SMEs balance the risk of losing their competitive advantage built on innovation and the benefit of creating a broader competence base with partnerships.

The paper, covering the actual argument of open innovation, aims to answer two main research questions, namely: “Which open innovation approach is adopted by the companies belonging to the ICTs industry?” and “Which types of collaborations are carried out by the companies and which are the dynamics that characterize it?”.

In order to answer the research questions a multiple case study methodology is adopted. The research framework was structured in three main phases: first, a literature review on the matter of open innovation in general and within the ICTs industry in particular, as well as of the specific features of the industry investigated, was carried out. Second, a list of questions containing the main issues that arose from the previous step has been designed for the case study protocol, to be used in the following structured interviews. Finally, structured direct interviews were conducted on three important Italian companies active in the telecommunications area.

Results highlighted different ways to manage the open innovation processes, based on teamwork or task forces, and the different roles, more or less proactive, that an information communication technology (ICT) company may undertake within this process. Moreover, they show that ICT companies acquire external knowledge and skills mainly from universities and research centers, as well as from value chain's actors (suppliers in primis).

Still little attention has been paid to the understanding of the open innovation approach of Italian firms belonging to the ICT industry, thus the authors believe that this paper may represent a valuable basis for future research on the open innovation issues in the field of ICT.

Patents as one of the important components of intellectual capital are emerging as a new source for mining insights on open innovation (OI) practice of the organizations. Their role in value creation through collaboration and the inter-firm differences is yet to be explored in depth.

To achieve the aim, survey data is analyzed to rank OI practices (collaboration) of the firms, while patent data are analyzed to carry out descriptive and bivariate analysis to study the inter-firm differences in collaboration.

The survey findings highlight mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and patent pooling as the top two preferred modes of OI, while from patent data M&A has emerged as a predominant OI practice for mainly nonresident firms. At the firm level characteristics, out of firm age, number of granted patents and firm size, firm age has been found to be somewhat significant in few cases of OI practices.

It provides an alternative source, in this case patent data to study open innovation capabilities of firms in India. There is contribution to the patent value theory from profit motive to deriving strategic decisions on collaboration.

The managerial implications of this study lie in realizing granted patents as important business tools for seeking collaboration, tracing competitive intelligence and the geography of innovation of the firms' competitors.

The dataset of granted patents at the Indian Patent office (2005–2017), the sample of pharmaceutical firms drawn from this list of patents, patent data– based OI insights and the use of multiple imputation technique to missing data for meaningful insights are some of the unique aspects of this paper.