The paradox of openness: Appropriability, external search and collaboration

By Keld Laursen, Ammon J. Salter. 2014

1,020 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To innovate, firms often need to draw from, and collaborate with, a large number of actors from outside their organization. At the same time, firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas. This gives rise to a paradox of openness—the creation of innovations often requires openness, but the commercialization of innovations requires protection. Based on econometric analysis of data from a UK innovation survey, we find a concave relationship between firms’ breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation, and the strength of the firms’ appropriability strategies. We show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search. There is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors. We explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy.

Subfields: Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9dff8eb5e9201e9f57664c48e0c1ef64c88f0d9d

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Citations in the corpus

The Adoption of Open Innovation in Large Firms (2018, background): “Another set of studies, including our own, focuses on the firm or business unit (Chesbrough and Brunswicker 2013, 2014; Laursen and Salter 2006, 2014).”
Open innovation: a new classification and its impact on firm performance in innovative SMEs (2015, background): “As collaboration can bring in various risks, such as information leakage (Laursen and Salter, 2014; Oakey, 2013), SMEs may prefer to collaborate with partners which may not threaten them.”
Platform Ecosystems: How Developers Invert the Firm (2017, neutral): “Laursen and Salter (2006, 2014) find a concave relationship between appropriability and openness.”
Innovation collaboration and appropriability by knowledge-intensive business services firms (2016, methodology): “Second, our research builds on earlier work showing the existence of a concave relation between innovation collaboration and importance of appropriability strategies for manufacturing firms (Laursen and Salter, 2014), and extends this for KIBS firms.”
Universities and open innovation: the determinants of network centrality (2019, background): “Whilst proximity results in increased knowledge flows, it may also present adverse effects related to involuntary knowledge spillovers, indicating additional spatial complexity related to openness and appropriability (Laursen and Salter 2014; Freel and Robson 2017).”
Value Creation and Value Capture in Open Innovation (2018, background): “This tension has been referred to as the “paradox of openness” (Laursen and Salter, 2014).”
Process Innovation: Open Innovation and the Moderating Role of the Motivation to Achieve Legitimacy (2018, methodology): “Contrary to the acquisition of information, which is relatively uninvolved, acquiring R&D requires a more detailed understanding of how knowledge developed externally can be combined with that developed internally (Laursen and Salter, 2014).”
Unravelling appropriability mechanisms and openness depth effects on firm performance across stages in the innovation process (2017, background): “Furthermore, recent studies signal the need for further investigation of appropriability and openness in regards to performance (Laursen and Salter, 2014), aswell as specific inquiry into the use of different types of IPPMs in various stages of the innovation process (Zobel et al., 2017).”
The paradox of openness revisited: Collaborative innovation and patenting by UK innovators (2016, background): “5 For instance, Laursen and Salter (2014) do not distinguish between formal appropriation mechanisms such as patents, and appropriation via secrecy or lead-time, Cassiman and Veugelers (2002) divide appropriation strategy into formal appropriation strategies (which include patents, but also trademar”
The relationship between knowledge search strategies and absorptive capacity: A deeper look (2016, background): “Previous studies suggest that searching widely and deeply has a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) relationship with performance (Laursen and Salter, 2006, 2014); however these studies did not consider what internal mechanisms might be involved in this relationship and may originate this type of effect.”
How open is innovation? A retrospective and ideas forward (2021, methodology): “This research neatly complements a wide range of papers using the Community Innovation Survey or similar datasets (see e.g., Laursen and Salter, 2006; 2014).”