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In today’s highly competitive business environment, firms can ill afford the consequences of overlooking opportunities for innovation. An organization seeking to increase its existing knowledge base, in most cases, aims to identify and pursue useful knowledge available outside its borders. However, for companies interested in engaging in collaborative arrangements for innovations, systematic approaches for knowledge transfer may become a major challenge. In our research we focus on the diffusion of innovative knowledge that occurs during a joint knowledge development process. We present an empirical study spanning the period 2004 to 2018 which aims to explore the impact inter-organizational collaboration in the form of joint patenting has on the distance between partners’ technological bases. In addition, this paper looks into the change in technological distance when joint patenting occurs between different-country and same-country partners. The empirical results of the study suggest that engagement in joint patenting positively influences the technological proximity between partners and indicates a transmission and utilization of knowledge outside of firms’ existing knowledge base. Our findings contribute to knowledge related to innovation under inter?organizational collaboration and provides a basis for further theory development and testing.

The concepts of openness and sustainability have both enjoyed an increasing popularity in recent scientific literature. However, research has yet to fully utilize their combination and the potential carried toward developing strategies and policies toward solving complex sustainability issues. The primary objective of this paper is to identify and describe the theoretical connections between sustainability and open innovation. We investigate the structural and statistical aspects of recent open innovation literature in search of signs of sustainability using bibliometric metadata and perform a content analysis of articles relevant to Sustainable Open Innovation. Our findings indicate that despite a lack of institutionalized use of sustainability-related keywords, circa nine per cent of the sample articles materially discuss aspects of sustainability or societal concerns from various perspectives, but also lack a holistic and unified approach. As our primary contribution, we shift the level of inquiry in Sustainable Open Innovation research from an organizational-level toward a multi-level system understanding, situating our findings regarding open and sustainable forms of innovation present in the literature as a framework containing the individual, organizational, city, and regional levels and their interconnections.

This paper investigates the degree of integration of modern conceptions of sustainability in strategy research over time with a bibliometric network analysis based on co-citation linkages over arti...