Role of open innovation in the short- and long-term market success of new products: evidence from the Dutch food and beverages industry

Abstract

Innovative companies increasingly use resources from outside the company in order to speed up the innovation process. Building and maintaining an external network has become vital to an innovative company's strategy for survival and growth. The study takes a new approach by not only investigating the role of the innovation network on the product's performance soon after market launch, but also after seven years. We focus on the external network involved in the innovation process of a product, and not of the company as a whole. We analysed the role of technology-related and market-related actors in the networks for new and improved products separately as we expected significant differences between the two product groups. Based on an analysis of data on 129 products in the Dutch food and beverages industry we found that the involvement of specific technology-related actors (research institutes, companies providing training, companies supplying machinery and equipment) and market-related actors (customers, competitors, marketing companies) related significantly positively to both short- and long-term market performance of new products, but not of improved products.