Open strategies and innovation performance

Scholarly interest in the relationship between open strategies and innovation performance has been unfailing, and in recent years has even increased. The present paper focuses on inbound open strategies and reviews various approaches (transaction costs, competences, open innovation) dealing with firms´ decisions about these strategies. The different approaches result in different conclusions about the optimum level of openness. The different approaches are tested empirically taking account of the different degrees of openness (closed, semiopen, open, ultraopen) and their effects on sales of new–to-the-market products, and using a panel of Spanish firms from a CIS-type survey for 2004-2008. Our results show that closed and semiopen strategies are the most common among Spanish firms and that open strategies produce the best performance, while semiopen strategies are more effective than closed ones. These results hold across different subsamples based on firm size and industry, and are robust to different ways of defining the indicators and to different estimation methods.