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This article explores the effects of open innovation on innovation performance in military bureaucracies. While the understanding of how bureaucratic organizations can benefit from open innovation is still limited, this study discovered that open innovation can have a negative effect on innovation performance. However, leveraging an innovative culture can lead to improved innovation performance in organizations characterized by high levels of structure and hierarchy, especially those where secrecy and security are of vital importance.

Research on corporate-startup coll aboration has accelerated during the last two decades, and scholars have started to distinguish underlying drivers and challenges when these two types of partners engage to innovate. Despite accumulating insights, however, the body of literature on corporate-startup collaboration is rather fragmented with little integration, impeding the extent to which different perspectives can inform and draw from each other in finding ways to improve the collaboration between corporates and startups. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review and apply a paradox perspective to bring together separated domains of research about corporate-startup collaboration. In particular, our framework identifies four organisational tensions that manifest in corporate-startup collaboration and explains distinct coping mechanisms across different levels of analysis. Our emergent framework highlights the multifaceted nature of corporate-startup collaboration and provides various new avenues of research moving forward.

Annapoornima M. Subramanian, Moren Lévesque, and Vareska Van De Vrande were recognized as a runner up for the 2020 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award.

There is growing recognition that the governance of open innovation is interdependent with the outcome being developed. In this paper, we address the dynamic nature of open innovation governance through an in-depth, longitudinal case study of a commercial software firm and a big science centre co-developing a digital platform. We identified five processes through which the open innovation governance and its outcome – i.e., the platform – influenced each other. Specifically, we found that the governance of the collaboration played a major role in resolving tensions between the two partners, which had a profound impact on the design of the digital platform. In turn, the decisions surrounding the platform started to change the open innovation governance. Based on these insights, we develop implications for governing open innovation in the context of collaborating with a big science centre.

Research on firm search stresses the need for firms to adapt and align concurrently with their environment to optimize the ability to sense and seize opportunities for sustained performance. We postulate resource scarcity as an important contingency factor for the search-performance relationship, and assess its joint influence with high and low dynamism. Using a dataset spanning 23 years, we examine the performance implications of combinations of internal and external exploratory and exploitative search in resource-scarce environments, under conditions of high and low dynamism. We find that resource scarcity is an important condition for performance stemming from exploratory and exploitative search: even under conditions that involve low dynamism, but joined with resource scarcity, firms may benefit from pursuing exploratory and exploitative knowledge simultaneously.

This article investigates the impact of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments and inventors' mobility on the extent to which new ventures use incumbents' knowledge resources as inputs for their innovation activities. Our findings suggest that ventures receiving CVC investments draw less on investors' knowledge, while inventor mobility increases the extent to which an incumbent's technological knowledge is used by recipient ventures. Ventures combining CVC investments and inventor mobility from the same incumbent are selected for drawing less on that incumbent's patents, but these citation flows increase in the period after investment and the inventors' hiring events are combined. Our results, thus, unveil the organizational complexity associated with the individual and combined roles of CVC investments and inventor mobility in determining new ventures' innovation behaviors.

Today’s business environment is characterised by fast and frequent change, which is often difficult to predict. As a consequence, companies need to continuously invest in the development of new business to remain competitive. However, due to the increasing complexity of the environment, internal development is often not enough, and collaborative innovation is becoming more important. There are three areas that warrant our attention. First, interest among employees and organisations to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives raises questions around the management and support that is needed to foster these initiatives and how to best organise internal corporate venturing. Second, the increasing number of start-ups provides opportunities for existing companies to tap into emerging technologies and business areas through corporate – start-up collaboration. Third, the changing nature of work provides an opportunity for existing organisations to rethink the relationship they have with their employees and to find a way to benefit from the increased flexibility of their own and other’s workers. I will raise a number of research questions in these areas and provide directions for future research in the field.

The successful identification and exploitation of new business opportunities is of paramount importance for firm performance (Zahra and Covin 1995). Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) research has provided great insight into managerial and organizational factors that enhance the level of innovation, venturing and renewal activities (Burgers and Covin 2014; Heavey and Simsek 2013; Zahra 1996). Such studies often focus on the outcome in terms of exploited ideas and opportunities (Foss et al. 2013; Hornsby et al. 2009), thereby ignoring the corporate entrepreneur. Yet, entrepreneurship happens on the nexus of individuals and opportunities (Shane 2012) and “we cannot lose sight of the reality that organizations do not see opportunities, individuals do” (Krueger 2000, p. 6). We, therefore, need a better understanding of who corporate entrepreneurs are.