Ready to Be Open? Explaining the Firm-Level Barriers to Benefiting from Openness to External Knowledge

This paper provides new theory and evidence about the benefits of openness on a firm’s innovation performance and, more importantly, the specific firm-level contingencies under which those benefits are more (or less) likely to be observed. Building on Dyer and Singh’s (1998) relational view, we suggest that a firm’s lack of resources and absorptive capacity, as well as its use of secrecy, are significant barriers to benefiting from openness to...