Abstract
A key issue for transition to a more sustainable future is how to promote collaboration for innovation amongst multiple diverse partners. However, collaborating for innovation requires that firms overcome the paradox of openness, i.e., they need to be open to collaboration to innovate and at the same time protect their internal knowledge and intellectual assets to appropriate value from their innovations. The aim of this paper is to investigate how knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms can overcome this paradox—which is an important barrier to future transitions—by choosing a combination of collaborative partners and appropriability strategies that support their ability to create more radical innovations. We analyze a sample of over 2450 KIE firms, drawing from a cross-European survey. Our results indicate how different partners, and different appropriability strategies, are more, or less, relevant to the generation of the radical innovations needed to transform society into one with a sustainable future; university collaboration and the use of formal protection mechanisms seem especially important for such new-to-the-world innovations. Our study includes important policy implications for how to support and promote future sustainable transitions and also establishes a foundation for future lines of research regarding entrepreneurship and sustainable transition.
Highlights
Firms are central for transforming our societies and economies towards systems of sustainable production and consumption, i.e., accomplishing sustainable transition
Firms need to collaborate with external actors to augment their internal resources and knowledge base with external inputs; smaller entrepreneurial firms especially need collaboration to overcome the resource constraints resulting from their limited age and size [9,10,11]
We explore the explicit considerations of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship (KIE) firms in relation to their choice of collaborative partners and the different types of appropriability strategies, ranging from formal appropriability mechanisms protected by law to informal appropriability mechanisms, such as secrecy, lead time and complexity
Summary
Firms are central for transforming our societies and economies towards systems of sustainable production and consumption, i.e., accomplishing sustainable transition. The aim of this paper is to investigate how knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms can overcome the openness paradox by choosing a combination of collaborative partners and appropriability strategies that support their innovativeness This is an important problem since stimulating and supporting the creation of radical innovations is a vital necessity for sustainable transition to take place [1,11]. We investigate how KIE firms can overcome the openness paradox [17,24] by choosing a combination of collaborative partners and appropriability strategies that supports their ability to create more radical innovations, an approach for which there is currently little evidence in the literature [17,20]. The Paradox of Openness in Knowledge-Intensive Entrepreneurship (KIE) Firms: Openness, Appropriability Strategies and Innovation Performance
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