Abstract
Leveraging external sources of knowledge has become a vital element of innovation strategy, especially in emerging markets, where many firms lack the sophisticated knowledge required to innovate. However, extant research in this domain puts little emphasis on emerging economies and also typically treats openness as a firm-level concept. In contrast, this study investigates how individual employees rely on both internal and external knowledge to increase their innovative work output (and, secondarily, their customer acquisition performance) and how their supervising manager’s characteristics moderate these mechanisms. Using hierarchical linear modeling of data collected from 123 employees and 50 managers in telecommunications companies in the emerging market of Vietnam, we find support for our hypothesized relationships. These findings have important implications for research and practice as they highlight the role of the individual employee in open innovation, the need for considering a more distributed set of organizational functions, and the relevance for emerging markets.
Highlights
Innovation is important for enhancing customer value and, customer equity and competitive advantage, as Rajendra Srivastava and V
Control variables include the duration of the manager–employee relationship (MgrEmp_RelD) and manager age (MgrAge) to reduce the likelihood of misinterpreting the effects of manager experience (H6) and manager technical competence (H4–H5)
Our study examines whether firms in an emergent market can strategically deploy the appropriate managerial resources to help their employees leverage internal and external knowledge sources into innovative output
Summary
Innovation is important for enhancing customer value and, customer equity and competitive advantage, as Rajendra Srivastava and V. Firms in emergent markets still tend to lack advanced knowledge and capabilities (Bogers et al 2019; Fu et al 2014), which limits their opportunities for innovation and customer value creation (Frank and Enkawa 2008). Research on emerging market firms has emphasized, but not yet shown empirically, the importance of drawing on external knowledge sources to strengthen their internal innovation processes (Guerrero and Urbano 2017; Hertenstein and Williamson 2018). Such processes are discussed in the literature on open innovation, defined as “a distributed innovation process that involves purposively managed knowledge flows across the organizational boundary”
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