Open service innovation and the firm's search for external knowledge

By Andrea Mina, Elif Bascavusoglu-Moreau, A. Hughes. 2014

404 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The concept of open innovation captures the increasing propensity of firms to work across their traditional boundaries of operation. This phenomenon has largely been studied from the viewpoint of manufacturing businesses while services have received much less attention despite the predominant role they play in advanced economies. This paper focuses on open innovation in services, both as a subsector of the economy and as a component of the activities of manufacturing firms. We study the open innovation practices of business services firms and then consider the implications for open innovation of the adoption of a service inclusive business model by manufacturing firms. Our analyses are based on a unique dataset with information on open innovation activities amongst UK firms. Overall, engagement in open innovation increases with firm size and RD they are more engaged in informal relative to formal open innovation practices than manufacturers; and they attach more importance to scientific and technical knowledge than to market knowledge compared to manufacturing firms. Open innovation practices are also associated with the adoption of a service inclusive business model in manufacturing firms and service-integrated manufacturers engage in more informal knowledge-exchange activities. The paper contributes towards a reconceptualisation of open innovation in service businesses and a deeper evidence-based understanding of the service economy.

Subfields: Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f1a62f5f527ffbdf428f21f4603281434a87ea9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Ian Miles
2. P. Robson
3. Mark Freel

In Strategy and Management

1. Mark Freel
2. Panos Desyllas
3. M. Miozzo
4. Lars Bengtsson
5. Ian Miles
6. Hsing-fen Lee
7. Ioana Stefan
8. P. Robson

Citations in the corpus

• Innovation collaboration and appropriability by knowledge-intensive business services firms (2016, background): “This finding is in line with the existing literature (e.g., Laursen and Salter, 2014; Mina et al., 2014), and therefore increases our confidence in the survey results.”
• Unravelling appropriability mechanisms and openness depth effects on firm performance across stages in the innovation process (2017, background): “A large body of literature emphasizes in recent years the utter importance of external knowledge search and efficient knowledge recombination in order to innovate (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014;Mina et al., 2014; Martini et al., 2015).”
• Appropriation strategies and open innovation in SMEs (2016, background): “Despite recent contributions (Laursen and Salter, 2014; Mina et al., 2014), relatively little is known about how approaches of SMEs to appropriation relate to their open innovation practices.”
• Open innovation: current status and research opportunities (2017, neutral): “However, thus far researchers have largely ignored this topic, with Mention (2011) and Mina, Bascavusoglu-Moreau, and Hughes (2014) being rare exceptions.”