EXPLORING OPEN SEARCH STRATEGIES AND THEIR PERCEIVED IMPACT ON INNOVATION PERFORMANCE—EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Given Chesbrough's idea of open innovation, it could be said that external knowledge is an important element in the optimisation of in-house innovation. External knowledge is distributed among various actors and is accessible through many channels. However, we still do not know much about the search strategies that affect innovation performance. Our study therefore explores the relationship between open knowledge search strategies and company-level innovative performance. This study examines the open search strategies of 193 firms on the basis of cross-sectional data from Finnish markets. We identified four specific strategies, namely (1) market-driven, (2) science-driven, (3) intermediary-driven and (4) generic-knowledge-driven. According to the results, all except intermediary-driven strategies positively affect innovation performance.