Events

By linking an open innovation perspective and a contingency view, this paper contributes to the open innovation literature in two ways. First, answering the recent call of scholars, we bring environmental context into open innovation research. In line with a ‘fit as moderation’ perspective we claim that some environmental contingencies might be favorable for searching broadly, but less favorable for searching deeply. To the best of our knowledge this is the first empirical study that explicitly focuses on specific contingencies in the external environment that shape firms’ ability to benefit from open innovation. Second, rather than treating search openness as a homogeneous construct, we explicitly focus on the differential effects of breadth and depth on firms’ innovation performance. As we will show, this approach delivers a more fine-grained understanding of how contingencies affect the value of external search breadth and depth and their differential impact on innovation performance.

Using a novel panel data set of Japanese inventors, we investigate how monetary incentives affect corporate inventors' behavior and performance. Furthermore, we analyze how these incentives interact with intrinsic motivation. Our findings are as follows: (1) While introducing or raising revenue-based payments is associated with higher patent quality, such schemes decrease the number of citations to non-patent literature; (2) the strength of intrinsic motivation - measured by the importance of the inventors’ interest in contributing to the advancement of science (“taste for science” hereafter) - raises the inventors' patent productivity; and (3) the taste for science weakens the marginal effect of monetary incentives on inventive productivity, and further reinforces the negative effect of monetary incentives on the inventors’ backward citations from non-patent literature.

We present an empirical analysis of the effects of patent thickets at the European Patent Office on entry into patenting by UK firms. Using a direct measure of patent thicket density, we provide evidence for the existence and growth of patent thickets in specific industries, notably in telecommunications, audiovisual technology, and computer technology. Our analysis indicates that the density of patent thickets is associated with reduced entry into patenting in the particular technology area (controlling for the level of patenting in that area). We find this effect to be particularly pronounced for electronics and telecommunications. It is also stronger for smaller than for large companies.