The Moderating Effect of Social Capital between Organizational Slack and Managerial Practices for Open Innovation in Venture SMEs

Abstract

This research is designed to analyze the moderating effect of social capital between organizational slack and managerial practices for open innovation. After controlling the firm size, firm age, and environmental uncertainty, we test two hypotheses. First, we test the hypothesis that organizational slack has a positive effect on managerial practices for open innovation. Especially we focus on the managerial innovation and open innovation because recently managerial innovation and open innovation are more and more important. Second, we test the moderating role of social capital between organizational slack and managerial practices for open innovation. Because social capital is a kind of networking activity, we assume that social capital can contribute to managerial practices for open innovation through the networking activity. For this research, we administered the questionnaire surveys, and got the 250 effective data(companies) in Korea. Then we used the validity, reliability, correlation and multiple regression analysis by means of SPSS 18.0. As a result, we can find the two meaningful results. First, organizational slack, especially not absorbed slack but unabsorbed slack, has positive effect on managerial practices for open innovation. It is because absorbed slack such as excessive facilities, machines, or employees is not useful in managerial practices for open innovation. On the other hand, unabsorbed slack is useful in managerial practices for open innovation because unabsorbed slack such as excessive money or securities is very flexible and active. Taken together, the relationship between managerial practices for open innovation and unabsorbed slack is proven in terms of flexibility. Second, social capital has a moderating effect positively between organizational slack, especially not absorbed slack but unabsorbed slack, and managerial practices for open innovation. A prior study related to the relationship between managerial practices for open innovation and social capital doesn’t exist yet, so this analysis result is very meaningful in academic respect. But this research has some limitations. First, this research is analyzed by limited region (Korea) and samples (250 companies), so more global regions and samples are recommended in the future. Second, we focus on managerial practices for open innovation in this paper, so the studies about technological practices for open innovation are recommended in the future.