When Should firms be "Open"? The Moderating Role of IT Competency in Inter-Organizational Open Innovation Collaboration (original) (raw)

Open innovation has gained momentum in recent years. Prior research has shown the critical role of openness in understanding the inter-organizational collaboration process. However, existing studies largely focus on search openness instead of the openness in actual collaboration. In addition, it remains unclear how the new emerged organizational competencies on information technology will shift the role of openness in collaboration. In this study, we investigate the role of collaboration openness in open innovation collaboration and explore the moderating role of information technology competencies. Drawing on the theory of inter-organizational relationship and resource-based view, we examine the conditions under which firms should be “open” in the actual collaboration. We develop hypotheses on network uncertainty, collaboration openness and open innovation performance. The model also incorporates the moderating effects of competitive IT capability and IT intensity. The proposed hyp...