A study on customer knowledge management, inbound open innovation and firm performance

BACKGROUND: Open innovation is one of the most effective ways to innovate and gain a competitiveness of enterprises, and customer knowledge stands as the cornerstone in all the external sources of innovation. As a result, the management of customer knowledge is critical for the implementation of the innovation activities and the enhancement of the firm performance. OBJECTIVE: Taking open innovation situation based on the knowledge flow view as the research background, this study explores and examines the relation among customer knowledge management, inbound open innovation and firm performance with the data collected from 238 enterprises in ICT industry. RESULTS: The results show that the customer knowledge management has significantly positive effects on the firm performance, and knowledge from customers is the most important part of customer knowledge management. CONCLUSIONS: Resource acquisition, resource integration and interaction mechanism are the three dimensions of open innovation process which play a partial role in mediating respectively between customer knowledge management and firm performance, with the resource integration effecting the firm performance mostly.