Is Your Open-Innovation Successful? The Moderating Role of the Human and Organizational Internal Context

In this paper our objective is to explore the relationship among firm absorptive capacity, open-approach to innovation and innovative performance. We operationalize absorptive capacity as a multi-item construct which takes into account levels of skills, social capital and some organizational features. Openapproach to innovation has been interpreted as an approach achievable in continuum in terms of intensity of collaboration with few or many partners. Innovative performance takes into account several factors such as the enlargement of the company’s competence base and the improvement of the time to market. On the basis of data collected from 106 Italian manufacturing companies, first we find that a low level of absorptive capacity impacts negatively on the firm orientation in adopting a more open approach, despite the several pressures to openness. Second, we also study the relationship between openness and firm innovative performance: this relation is positively moderated by absorptive capacity measures. This suggests that openness is not critical per se to enhance innovative performance and that a favourable social-organizational context is needed to make collaboration a success. The results are important to managers because they show under what internal-context conditions open innovation enhances firm innovative performance.