Hacia la comprensión de los microfundamentos de la innovación abierta

Open innovation has emerged as a new paradigm for organizations to innovate by collaborating and exchanging knowledge with external stakeholders. Previous research on open innovation has focused on the organizational level, with limited research investigating individual-level capacities and behavior necessary to deploy open innovation in organizations. Drawing on research on routines and microfoundations, and using a multiple case study design, this paper clarifies the microfoundations that underpin open innovation capability deployment within organizations. Findings reveal that these microfoundations rest on lower-level managers enacting both internally- and externally-directed coping routines to overcome constraints they face in deploying open innovation. We further find that these coping routines are based on the lower-level managers’ cognitive capacities, which in turn leverages three individual memory elements – transactive, procedural and declarative – characterizing the cognitive microfoundations of open innovation. In providing this clarification, this paper advances the open innovation literature by elucidating that open innovation routines that make up an open innovation capability encompass individuals’ cognitive coping routines that are both internally- and externally-directed, as a necessary ‘cospecialised asset’ to deploy such an organizational capability. We also contribute to the microfoundations literature by specifying the distinctive role of lower-level managers (as opposed to senior-level managers) and by outlining how constraints experienced by these lower-level managers trigger the development and use of memory as a crucial aspect of managerial cognition, that ultimately shape the deployment of open innovation routines and capabilities. Our insights shed light on how lower-level managers responsible for implementing open innovation in organizations overcome constraints in their daily practice of open innovation, and enact cognitive coping routines that enable the organization to benefit from open innovation.