Openness Degree and Performance in the Search for Innovation: a Practice-based Approach

Search of external knowledge has been object of increasing attention in the past few years coherently with the rise of firm’s innovation models based on a higher degree of openness towards external actors. This work has investigated the knowledge search practices that firms enact to innovate their products, exploring the relationships among performance of innovation processes and two key attributes of search practices such as their breadth and depth of usage. In so doing, we have explored the role of openness through the lens of search practices rather than the variety of external actors from which firms draw relevant knowledge to their innovation activities. Evidences highlights three key findings: (1) the depth of search practices is more beneficial to radical innovation performance than the breadth of search; (2) depth of search practices has a positive influence on incremental innovation performance; and (3) when firms foster internal networking and boundary spanning in order to reconfigure knowledge architecture and combine knowledge elements in new ways, search and breadth of search practices are more beneficial on the market success of radical product innovation. Instead, internal networking systems are unimportant in more incremental innovation processes, as this type of changes does not require any particular reconfiguration of networks and knowledge architecture within organizations