Collaboration scope and product innovation in B2B markets: are there too many cooks or is it the customer who spoils the broth?

Abstract

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. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate two new limits of openness, grounded in attention-based theory, that help explain why such a shift has not occurred. This study argues that specific combinations of identities a firm collaborates with, that is, whether a partner is classified as a customer, supplier, competitor or university and/or technological center..