Open Innovation:The Role Of Informal Ties,Market Dynamism And Business Model Design

The concept of open innovation(OI)has recently captured the wide attention of academics and practitioners alike,as it seems to have positive impacts on firm performance.Despite its benefits,adopting this innovation model does not seem to be easy as several challenges beset the open process.For example,OI primarily focus on identification of proper and compatible external knowledge as well as their exploitation,respectively.However,extant researches provide little evidence about how to implement that.In addition,a large amount of researches suggest,even adopting this innovation model,firms may benefit differentially from various open strategies;and it is unclear why this is so.This thesis aims to address the above issues by examining the drivers of OI as well as the impacts of OI.It consists of two essays,and specifically,the first essay focuses on OI antecedent while the second essay focuses on OI consequence.Based on resource-based view and the network perspective,the first essay explores the relationships between three types of informal ties(i.e.business,government,and university)and firms' inbound and outbound OI.In addition,this essay also develops a contingent condition,market dynamism,and shows how changing market contexts vary the influences of informal ties with respect to two types of OI.The second essay explores two kinds of inbound OI strategies:(a)the horizontal strategy-OI breadth;and(b)vertical strategy-OI depth,and their influences on firm new product development speed,respectively.In addition,from a contingent view,this essay investigates the fit between firms' business model design(i.e.efficient and novel)and two types of inbound OI strategies,and how their interactions jointly affect new product development speed.Collectively,this thesis contributes to current 01 literature by more precisely explaining the relationships between informal ties and OI as well as the relationships between different OI strategies and firm business model design.This thesis therefore highlights and confirms the positive effect of informal ties on innovation openness and also accounts for the changing market conditions that could vary such effect by showing the strengthened effect of university ties and weakened effect of business ties on inbound openness,respectively.In addition,firms that attempt to adopt inbound OI to facilitate new product development speed should focus on changing their business model around either the efficient or novel design,to accommodate different inbound OI strategies.For OI breadth that broadly involves various external partners into innovation process,novel business model is more appropriate,while efficient is more suitable for OI depth that deeply relies on few knowledge-intensive partners.Such knowledge offers a better understanding of how firms could exert their network to implement both inbound and outbound OI,and how to design business model along with the inbound Of breadth and depth may therefore greatly benefit innovation performance.