Profiting from external knowledge: How firms use different knowledge acquisition strategies to improve their innovation performance

Innovation managers and innovation scholars increasingly emphasize the open innovation model, introduced by Henry Chesbrough in 2003. This model postulates that the innovation process should be flexible and cross organizational boundaries, which enables the transfer of knowledge and capabilities between organizations. However, until now, it remained unclear which types of firms apply open innovation, whether it realy raises their performance, and how this can be managed in the best way. This book addresses the important issue how innovative firms profit from external knowledge to improve their innovation performance. Using large scale empirical evidence from the Dutch industry, this book shows that especially Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) and firms from low-tech sectors have increasingly adopted open innovation strategies over the period 1994-2004, and are clearly catching up large and high-tech firms. The results indicate that firms pursuing an open innovation strategy perform better with regard to innovation than firms that innovate exclusively in-house. In contrast to the common opinion that large Mergers & Acquisitions (M&As) are bad for innovation, it turns out that M&As have a positive impact on long-term innovation performance. In times of economic cricis this can be an extra argument for governments to back large scale M&As. Large (medium) high-tech M&As in the life sciences industry were analysed in-depth, to investigate the dynamics of post M&A integration. This book shows the different types of innovation synergies that can be expected from M&As and how they can be realized by systematic post M&A integration. Finally, this book studies how innovation brokers fulfill essential roles in innovation networks of SMEs in the agri-food sector. It provides guidelines for managers in innovation networks to improve the performance of these networks.