Open Strategies and Innovation Performance

Scholarly interest in the relationship between open strategies and innovation performance has been unfailing, and in recent years has even increased. The present paper focuses on inbound open strategies and reviews various approaches (transaction costs, competences, open innovation) dealing with firms' decisions about these strategies. The different approaches result in different conclusions about the optimum level of openness. They are tested empirically taking account of the different degrees of firms' openness (closed, semi-open, open, ultra-open) and their relationship with sales of new-to-the-market products, and using a panel of Spanish firms from a Community Innovation Survey type survey for the period 2004-2008. Our results show that closed and semi-open strategies are the most common among Spanish firms and that open strategies are associated with the best performance, while semi-open strategies are correlated to a higher performance than closed ones. These results hold across different subsamples based on firm size and industry, and are robust to different ways of defining the indicators and to different estimation methods.