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Open innovation practices in SMEs and large enterprises

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Abstract

Few studies on open innovation (OI) address OI practices in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and how their use of OI and the resulting benefits differ from those of large enterprises. The lack of resources in SMEs to engage in looking outward is said to be a barrier to OI, but at the same time this shortage is cited as a motive for looking beyond organisational boundaries for technological knowledge. We investigate how OI dimensions impact the innovative performance of SMEs in comparison to large companies. The key finding is that the effects of OI practices in SMEs often differ from those in large firms. SMEs are more effective in using different OI practices simultaneously when they introduce new products on the market, whereas this is less the case for large firms. Turnover from new products in SMEs is driven by intellectual property protection mechanisms, while large firms in this case benefit more from their search strategies.

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Notes

  1. Because our research uses cross-sectional data, the result ignores the possible reaction of the introduction of new products and services on OI strategies. Potential problems of reverse causality should be tackled by introducing instrumented variables, but these are not available in the innovation survey. By the same token the issue of potential unobserved heterogeneity cannot be addressed using our database. We thank the anonymous referees for pointing this out.

  2. Because the CIS contains different numbers of questionnaire items underlying the OI measures, we rescaled these measures to include minimum values of 0 and maximum values of 10. Appendix 1 reports the Cronbach alpha’s for all measures, indicating that they are reliable measures of OI (with the possible exception of protection).

  3. We have adopted the approach of Laursen and Salter (2006) and have investigated the potential existence of any non-linear relations among the variables (although no specific hypotheses were formulated in this respect). None of the additional variables turned out to be significant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Belgian Science Policy Office, Avenue Louise 231, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    André Spithoven

  2. Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium

    Wim Vanhaverbeke & Nadine Roijakkers

  3. Esade Business School, Barcelona, Spain

    Wim Vanhaverbeke

  4. National University of Singapore, Singapore, China

    Wim Vanhaverbeke

Authors
  1. André Spithoven
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  2. Wim Vanhaverbeke
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  3. Nadine Roijakkers
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Correspondence to André Spithoven.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 Detailed description of all variables used in the analysis
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Appendix 2

See Table 5.

Table 5 Descriptive statistics for all variables (N = 967)
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Appendix 3

See Table 6.

Table 6 Correlation matrix
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Spithoven, A., Vanhaverbeke, W. & Roijakkers, N. Open innovation practices in SMEs and large enterprises. Small Bus Econ 41, 537–562 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-012-9453-9

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