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Collaboration Scope And Product Innovation In B2b Markets: Are There Too Many Cooks Or Is It The Customer Who Spoils The Broth?, Erik Mooi, Ernst C. Osinga, Carlos D. Santos

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: Product innovations are often the result of combinations of internal and external knowledge. A significant amount of Open Innovation literature has argued that working with external partners can be beneficial, in particular when this is complemented by internal R&D yet a wholesale shift to Open Innovation has not occurred. Our work demonstrates two new limits of openness, grounded in attention-based theory, that help explain why such a shift has not occurred. We argue that specific combinations of identities a firm collaborates with, i.e., whether a partner is classified as a customer, supplier, competitor, or university and/or technological center predictably …