Open Innovation with Scientific and Business Partners: the Mediating Role of Internal Relational Social Capital in Fostering Innovation Ambidexterity

Open innovation literature suggests that firms can improve their innovation ambidexterity by learning from users, customers, suppliers, universities, research centers. However, the success of such new paradigm is still debatable and literature is searching for its determinants. A firms’ internal social context seems to be crucial to explain the success or failure of open innovation in terms of all facets of innovation performance (i.e. ambidextrous performance). Despite this assumption, a firm’s internal context is still poorly investigated as concerns its role to support open innovation success. Moreover, even when literature investigates the internal context, main contributions commonly analyze the relationship between the internal context and open innovation practices by considering internal context elements as attitudinal antecedents to openness. Instead, it is almost ignored the fact that the level of such social attitudes of the employees to collaborate and exchange knowledge (i.e. internal relational capital) can be strengthened just by open innovation implementation and that this strengthening is the premise to achieve innovation ambidexterity. Our study, relied on a survey research developed in Finland, Italy and Sweden, suggests that collaborations with different typologies of partners (i.e. scientific networks and business networks) achieve good results in terms of innovation ambidexterity, through the partial mediation of internal relational social capital.