The evolution of industry has recently attracted the attention of scholars studying the relationships between exploration and exploitation strategies and innovation performance. Surprisingly, although extant research has already acknowledged its multidimensional character, it has only been analyzed in an aggregate fashion. In this paper, we distinguish two components of the evolution of industry, the pace of market evolution and the pace of technology evolution, and we elaborate on their different impacts in the context of exploration and exploitation strategies. More precisely, we argue that while a rapid pace of technology evolution has opposite impacts on the relationships between exploration (positive), exploitation (negative) and innovation performance, a rapid pace of market evolution positively affects both exploration and exploitation. Our findings provide substantial support for our prediction using a large panel of Spanish innovating firms for the period 2008-2012.

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Entrepreneurs are subjected to increased institutional pressures that encourage them to include environmental issues in their overall business objectives. Despite this, entrepreneurs do not always place the same importance on environmental issues in the overall objectives, but some are more environmentally oriented than others. We contend that these differences are explained by two factors: the stage of evolution of the venture and the intensity of coercive and normative environmental pressures on entrepreneurs. Using a sample of 9781 entrepreneurs from 27 countries, our research shows that entrepreneurs are more environmentally oriented (1) in early stages of evolution, (2) in countries with high coercive pressures, and (3) in countries with high normative pressures. Additionally, our results indicate that the differences in the environmental orientation in the early and late stages are reduced in countries with high normative pressures and that these differences are not influenced by the intensity of coercive pressures.

The study of firms’ decisions on open innovation has recently attracted the attention of scholars studying the process that firms follow from closed to open models. Extant research has acknowledged that firms tend toward open innovation models and has identified the optimum levels of breadth and depth of openness toward which firms should tend. Surprisingly, there is little evidence on how firms move toward open innovation and whether they follow scholars’ recommendations. In this paper, we investigate the adoption of the open innovation model, studying firms’ decisions on breadth and depth and switching behaviours over time. This paper provides a discussion of firms’ degree of openness and how firms structure and reassess their decisions on open innovation over time. This framework was applied to the Panel of Technological Innovation database that includes data on Spanish innovating firms for the period 2005–2013.