Managing open innovation with scientific and business partners: the mediating role of organizational practices and collaborative mindset in fostering ambidexterity

Open innovation literature suggests that firms can improve their innovation performance by learning from users, customers, suppliers, universities, research centres. However, the success of such new paradigm is still debatable and literature is searching for its determinants. In particular, the firms’ internal organizational context seems to be crucial to explain the success or failure of open innovation: firms which attempt to leverage partners’ knowledge must design an appropriate internal organization, made of organizational practices and human resources attitudes. Despite this assumption, the firm internal context is still poorly investigated as concerns its role to support open innovation success. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the relationships among collaboration behaviour, organizational practices, internal collaborative attitudes, thus investigating firms capacity to reach high levels of innovative performance through an open approach. Our study, relied on a survey research developed in Finland, Italy and Sweden, suggests that collaborations with different typologies of partners should be carefully managed, through the development and implementation of organizational and HR practices, in order to foster ambidexterity. In this way both the scientific network (made up of organizations that are not permanently linked in a direct economic sense) and the business networks (made up of partners who belong to a common supply chain or are situated at the same level of a supply chain) allow the achievement of exploitative and explorative innovations: in the former case, only the use of an appropriate and formal set of collaborative practices and employees’ attitude towards openness leads to the development of ambidexterity.