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Having a gatekeeper position in a collaborative network offers firms great potential to gain competitive advantages. However, it is not well understood what kind of collaborations are associated with such a position. Conceptually grounded in social network theory, this study draws on the resource-based view and the relational factors view to investigate which types of collaboration characterize firms that are in a gatekeeper position, which ultimately could improve firm performance in subsequent periods. The empirical analysis utilizes a unique longitudinal data set to examine dynamic network formation. We used a data crawling approach to reconstruct collaboration networks among the 500 largest companies in Germany over nine years and matched these networks with performance data. The results indicate that firms in gatekeeper positions often engage in medium-intensity collaborations and less likely weak-intensity collaborations. Strong-intensity collaborations are not related to the likelihood of being a gatekeeper. Our study further reveals that a firm's knowledge base is an important moderator and that this knowledge base can increase the benefits of having a gatekeeper position in terms of firm performance.

To adapt to changing technological and market conditions, firms perform open innovation (OI) activities. However, not all firms manage to increase their adaptiveness through OI. Depending on the level of partner alignment, different types of OI activities may thrive or fail. Drawing on social network theory, this study investigates how firms should arrange partner alignment to realize the full potential of highly and weakly interactive OI activities and foster firms’ technology and market adaptiveness and, ultimately, innovation success. Using empirical tests on a multi-industry data set gathered from 181 managers, the results show that firms that perform highly interactive OI activities should strive for high partner alignment to enhance their technology and market adaptiveness. In contrast, firms employing weakly interactive OI activities should avoid high partner alignment, as such alignment lowers the positive impact of these OI activities on both technological and market adaptiveness and, in turn, decreases innovation success.

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.

A gatekeeper position in a collaboration network is highly valuable because firms can access partners, who are not connected with each other, and thus offer distant knowledge. However, managers are...