Abstract:

The open innovation (OI) paradigm (Chesbrough, 2003) has found a ready audience amongst scholars, business people and policy makers who recognize new opportunities to innovate in the access to external sources of knowledge and technology.

This work enters the debate on OI by analyzing the effects of OI adoption on innovation performance, distinguishing between two different OI strategies - joint development and R&D outsourcing - and considering the mediating role of context-related issues. Figure 1 displays the relationships under investigation.