Learning from openness: The dynamics of breadth in external innovation linkages

By J. Love, S. Roper, Priit Vahter. 2014

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore how openness in terms of external linkages generates learning effects, which enable firms to generate more innovation outputs from any given breadth of external linkages. Openness to external knowledge sources, whether through search activity or linkages to external partners in new product development, involves a process of interaction and information processing. Such activities are likely to be subject to a learning process, as firms learn which knowledge sources and collaborative linkages are most useful to their particular needs, and which partnerships are most effective in delivering innovation performance. Using panel data from Irish manufacturing plants, we find evidence of such learning effects: establishments with substantial experience of external collaborations in previous periods derive more innovation output from openness in the current period. © 2013 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Subfields: Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/705c30fed64af484a93d926737b6a754d1baea73

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In Strategy and Management

1. J. Love
2. S. Roper
3. Mark Freel
4. Ying Zhou
5. P. Robson
6. Cindy Lopes-Bento
7. Hanna Hottenrott
8. K. Mole

Citations in the corpus

• R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be Too Much of a Good Thing? (2016, background): “Moreover, firms’ own experience is an important predictor of innovation success through external innovation linkages (Love et al. 2014).”
• Experience, age and exporting performance in UK SMEs (2016, background): “Our data are crosssectional, however, and the direction of causality is not therefore clear a priori: new-to-the-firm innovation may be driving interregional exporting, or it may be that inter-regional exporting is facilitating market exposure, more extensive knowledge search and more innovation (Fr”
• Appropriation strategies and open innovation in SMEs (2016, methodology): “…potential for CMV by varying the response type (mixing Likert scale questions, yes/no answers, percentages and absolute numbers), we formally tested for CMV using Harman’s one-factor test (for recent examples in the open innovation literature, see Leiponen and Helfat, 2010 and Love et al., 2013).”
• Entrepreneurial leadership, capabilities and firm growth (2015, background): “The processes and routines that support growth are supported by organizational capacities for knowledge acquisition and transformation (Grant, 1996; Love et al., 2014).”
• Process innovation in small- and medium-sized enterprises: The critical roles of external knowledge sourcing and absorptive capacity (2020, background): “The notion of drawing-in knowledge from the outside has been the subject of various studies that have aimed to examine how firms develop the knowledge necessary for fostering competitive positions in international markets (Laursen & Salter, 2006; Love et al., 2014; S. Lee et al., 2010; Van de Vrande”
• Product-service innovation and performance: the role of collaborative partnerships and R&D intensity (2019, positive): “We argue that specific strategic alliances (concentric) permit alternative development of such valueadding, innovative, integrated product-service solutions (Love et al., 2014).”