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

We explore the relationship among firm absorptive capacity, open-approach to innovation and innovative performance. We operationalize absorptive capacity as a multi-item construct which considers social capital and some organizational features. Open-approach to innovation is interpreted as an approach achievable in continuum in terms of intensity of collaboration with partners. Innovative performance considers several factors: 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 companies, we find that a low level of absorptive capacity impacts negatively on the firm orientation in adopting a more open approach. We also study the relationship between openness and firm innovative performance: this relation is positively moderated by absorptive capacity. 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.