Open strategy as a catalyst for innovation: Evidence from cross-sector social partnerships

Abstract

A principal advantage of open strategy as a decision-making paradigm is the magnification of both the accumulation and heterogeneity of knowledge. Since a key to innovation is the coalescing of dispersed knowledge, open strategy has been an attractive area of scholarly management research over the past two decades. Despite this attention, there has been a paucity of empirical studies on open strategy. Its predictions have not been adequately tested, its boundaries have not been enumerated, nor is the science settled on its application in organizational decision-making. To address this lacuna and to further explore the links between open strategy and innovation, we develop and refine the construct of open strategy and assess its relationship with a common predictor of innovation, absorptive capacity. Within this research, we assess the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the open strategy construct to theoretically refine, validate, and measure it for use in future analysis.