Open Innovation – A “Swingers’ Club” or “Going Steady”?

The term Open Innovation has become popular in recent years to describe an approach to innovation that decidedly goes beyond the boundaries of a single organization by encouraging firms to pull together knowledge and creativity from a wide variety of parties. As such, Open Innovation evokes an image of firms working with a multitude of partners, always searching for new linkages that could enhance their innovative potential, or for the highest bidders for knowledge that they may wish to sell – in short, this is a “swingers club” of firms engaged in innovation. Yet, drawing on resourced based view, absorptive capacity, and other concepts, we propose that firms, even when practicing Open Innovation, will not be all that open – rather, they will “go steady” with a more limited number of partners. To explore the microstructure of “openness” we develop a number of hypotheses for which we find general support in proprietary survey data from Spain.