CEO power and open innovation: evidence from China
Abstract
Purpose
How to successfully drive open innovation (OI) has become an important issue. However, the existing literature on the determinants of OI focuses on organizational and situational factors, while the “human side” of it remains poorly understood. To address such problem, this paper examines the impact of two core qualities of CEOs – CEO power and social capital – on three representative OI modes from a micro-level perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses the data of 4,213 firm-year observations from Chinese A-share listed companies. A panel logit model is used to test the hypotheses, and the author also uses clustering robust standard errors to ensure the robustness of the model.
Findings
A powerful CEO can drive the firm's adoption of technology, organization and market-oriented OI, and different types of social capital have a differential impact on such relationship. Specifically, the CEO's political social capital has a negative moderating effect, while his/her stronger business social capital can enhance the positive relationship between CEO power and various types of OI activities, as well as mitigate the negative effect of political social capital.
Originality/value
This paper echoes the call for more attention to be paid to the microfoundations of OI and provides theoretical implications for research on the convergence of OI and strategic leadership.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Research Foundation of Education Bureau of Hunan Province, China (No. 2020JGYB243 and, Xiangjiao Tong [2020] No. 94, item 16). The author is very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The author also appreciates the helpful guidance of Prof. Qinghua Xia.
Citation
Tan, M. (2023), "CEO power and open innovation: evidence from China", European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-04-2023-0298
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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