How Open Innovation and Information Systems Affect R&D Performance: A Knowledge Sharing Perspective

Open innovation is a paradigm for knowledge sourcing among organizations. Extant literature argues that organizations should take advantage of both external and internal ideas for innovation in organizations. For open innovation to be effective, however, organizations must be able to source knowledge to partners as well absorb the ideas and knowledge from external parties. It is critical to share the knowledge in the organization, and then both the external and internal knowledge can be applied to help the business. We argue that information systems (IS) play a key role in assimilation of knowledge and are critical to adoption of open innovation. In this research, we investigate how IS can facilitate the adoption of open innovations and knowledge sharing, and whether knowledge sharing affects organizational research and development (R&D) performance. In this Research-in-Progress we will test our research model with a matched-pair response survey involving two respondents from each organization. We expect that IS strategies will have direct effect on the level of open innovation adoption and that knowledge sharing will play a mediating role between open innovation and R&D performance.