Multi-Business Firms, Knowledge Flows and Intra-Network Open Innovations

Abstract

The increasing competition in the marketplace has led firms to change their innovation patterns to a more open system according to which they rely on networks to manage knowledge resources and innovate. The so-called open innovation paradigm has been developed by taking single-business firms and external networks as cornerstones of the standard model. However, in the case of multi-business firms, the role of internal networks has been neglected. Business units within multi-business corporations have the potential advantage of relying on both external partners and internal peers in order to support their product innovation process. The corporate network thus enables business units to provide knowledge (source knowledge from) to peers in their quest to bring new products onto the market. This study analyses the impact of four types of open innovation activities on business units' product innovation performance, which are classified according to the directionality (outside-in and inside-out) and locus (cross-business and across-boundaries) of the innovation flows. The results from a sample of 227 business units show that business units should look outside firm boundaries for inbound innovation and throughout business units for outbound innovation if they are to improve their innovation performance.

A multiple buyer – supplier relationship in the context of SMEs’ digital supply chain management

“…A qualitative approach might be applied to this empirical analysis to investigate in depth the way in which the digitalisation supports the implementation of really open and collaborative frameworks inside and outside firms. Finally, showing the relevant relationships of four proxies with the use of ICTs, we believe that the use of ICTs could improve SMEs' innovativeness as stated by (Llamas and Belk 2013): SMEs firm boundaries (Villasalero 2015(Villasalero , 2014bD'Ambrosio et al 2017) have become key to competitiveness, learning and innovation. Accordingly, the results also confirmed that there is a positive relationship between the use of ICTs and knowledge sharing activities (H 2 ).…”

The role of openness in explaining innovation performance in a regional context

“…Hence, to understand firms' innovation activities, we must consider not only internal R&D efforts, but also external sources of knowledge and firms' search activities (Villasalero 2015). Accordingly, we investigate the role of the search channels represented by various kinds of collaboration partners, including universities, public institutions and other private firms, and the scope of these collaborations-local versus global relationshipsthat firms use to search for innovative opportunities.…”

Open Innovation’s “Multiunit Back-End Problem”: How Corporations Can Overcome Business Unit Rivalry

“…Our study confirms cooperative managerial solutions already identified in the open innovation literature for outside-in knowledge from startups into multiunit organizations. 48 But our case study shows that in addition to the cooperative aspect, respect for and leveraging the competition is also needed in this context 49 as shown by the literature on the management of coopetition. The empirical managerial solutions identified to overcome the business rivalry and unlock the corporate-startup collaboration on digitalization transformation program-namely, the anonymization of the data, the addition of a champion level in charge of ensuring the collaboration and competition, the incentive systems (resources), and the temporal disconnect-are managerial tools already identified in the literature on managing internal coopetition and digital transformation, but to our knowledge, they have never been connected to the open innovation problems.…”