Content area
Full text
Introduction
In the early 2000s, Chesbrough (2003) coined the term open innovation (OI) to highlight the growing relevance of opening up the innovation development process outside a firm’s normal boundaries. Chesbrough (2006) defined OI as:
[…] the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.
Since then, the concept of OI has attracted growing interest among innovation management and management scholars and has become one of the most debated topics (Vanhaverbeke et al., 2014; Kovacs et al., 2015).
Within the OI literature, several studies (Laursen and Salter, 2006; Chiang and Hung, 2010; Hwang and Lee, 2010) have investigated the relationship between a firm’s degree of openness and its capacity to innovate, highlighting how the adoption of OI practices (Mortara and Minshall, 2011; Capone et al., 2018) has a significant impact on the innovative capacity of organisations. However, very few analyses have investigated the link between the relational dynamics of organisations and their innovation performance.
With this in mind, the aim of the current work is to investigate the relational dynamics for invention and, in particular, the impact of openness of invention process on the invention capacity of organisations. This work investigates the following research question:
What is the role of openness of network relationships for invention?
Numerous studies have underlined the relevance of networks in OI (Dittrich and Duysters, 2007; Belussi and Orsi, 2015; Enkel, 2010; Martinez-Torres, 2014; among others). However, the link between these two streams of research is still undervalued (Capone et al., 2018; Capone and Zampi, 2019). The current work aims to contribute to this debate by investigating the opening up of invention processes through firms’ network dynamics.
Moreover, the present paper can be placed in the debate regarding OI dynamics in restricted geographical contexts, such as cities, clusters or industrial districts (Cooke, 2005; Simard and West, 2006), and, particularly, it adds to these studies by showing the differences of clustered firms in adopting OI practices, which is a field that is still...