How individuals perform customer knowledge absorption practices - a contextual approach to open innovation

Abstract

Enabling individuals to perform open innovation practices requires an in-depth analysis of the context in which those practices are enacted. However, research on the context within which open innovation is practiced, is still in its beginning. This paper develops a theoretical framework of the relationship between open innovation practices, individuals performing those practices, and context factors that enable or constrain those individuals carrying out open innovation practices. Moreover, the paper reports empirical research on context factors enabling or constraining salespeople in performing customer knowledge absorption practices, a specific subset of open innovation practices, in a pharmaceutical packaging machines firm. The paper contributes to open innovation research by (1) advancing a contextual view on open innovation, (2) emphasizing the need to distinguish between open innovation practices that provide an analytical tool to unravel the social dimension of open innovation, and (3) identifying context factors that enable or constrain customer knowledge absorption.

Knowledge Coupling and Organizational Resilience: The Moderating Effect of Market Orientation

“…SKC refers to the acquisition of knowledge that is similar to firms’ existing knowledge elements to expand the knowledge base (Dibiaggio et al, 2014). Previous studies have found that in practice, the performance of knowledge absorption will be affected by environment uncertainty (Mahringer et al, 2019), but it has not been discussed whether a firm’s knowledge coupling will improve its ability to cope with adversity.…”