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To acquire needed resources, companies often build relationships with various types of partners in ‘open innovation’ (OI) relationships. However, such relationships have considerable downsides related to the risk of partners’ opportunistic behaviour, and managers need to know how to manage such behaviours if they are to profit from the external resources that OI relationships offer. Drawing on resource dependency theory, this study investigates how firms can manage their OI relationships effectively to deal with their upsides and downsides in terms of resource acquisition and opportunistic behaviour. Furthermore, this study examines an open organisational context in the form of open strategy as well as open structures and processes as contingency factors. The multisource data for the empirical analyses stem from survey data from managers in 181 companies and secondary data from a financial database. The results reveal that an open strategy facilitates the transformation of acquired resources into OI product performance and market success. However, an open strategy also increases the risk of partners’ opportunistic behaviour and its effect on OI product performance, contrary to the hypotheses. The results indicate that when firms seek to counter the negative impact of opportunistic behaviour, they should implement open structures and processes. Overall, the findings provide guidance for managers about how to ensure that their OI relationships thrive.