Abstract
Innovation is crucial for growth and business development, and represents a reliable way through which to gain competitiveness within the marketplace. Open innovation is expressed through three different processes: the acquisition of external technology (inbound innovation); the external exploitation of technology (outbound innovation); and coupled innovation. Based on a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature best able to detect the main thematic areas of the research topic, the aim of this paper is to investigate how the paradigm of open innovation influences firm performance and to provide suggestions for future research avenues.
Highlights
In economics, the term ‘innovation’ is used regularly but not often defined, despite such a concept being the cornerstone of business growth and development, and a way for companies to ensure strategic competitiveness
It was common for companies to carry out their development processes by relying exclusively on the support of internal resources, according to a model based on the notion of ‘closed innovation’
Through the closed innovation policy, benefits are obtained when the internal research and development (R&D) resources are such as to guarantee a continuous development of new products, services or technological processes; when this fails, it is more convenient to focus on another strategy, in order to create a network that includes external actors such as research institutes, academia, start-ups and stakeholders
Summary
The term ‘innovation’ is used regularly but not often defined, despite such a concept being the cornerstone of business growth and development, and a way for companies to ensure strategic competitiveness. Innovation activities have become increasingly more challenging, with leading managers employing different OI models to retain competitive advantages.[3] The adopted strategies such as the acquisition of external technology and the exploitation of internal technology can greatly improve firms’ innovation performance. It is useful to understand the activities and processes that enable OI by taking into consideration different aspects that entail the strategies related to knowledge management[22] and the role of human resources.[23] It is relevant to analyse the effects of OI on firms with regard to organisational performance,[24,25] innovation performance[26] and the efficiency of OI – still underexplored in the literature27 – as. The paper is organised as follows: section 2 describes and explains the proposed methodology; section 3 analyses the obtained results; section 4 provides an overview of the identified research trend; and section 5 outlines the conclusions and offers suggestions for further development
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