Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to conceptualise open innovation openness in three dimensions covering partners, innovation phases and content, and to use a large-scale survey to empirically examine how the openness affect innovation and economic performance. The study is based on a survey of R&D managers or similar in 327 Italian and Swedish firms. The results show that firms apply different kinds of openness in relation to the analysed dimensions of openness, but that the three dimensions are highly interrelated. Overall, customers and suppliers are the most common partners in open innovation; the collaboration with them mainly takes place during the experimentation and engineering phase in order to capture advanced technologies, products and processes, but also to capture suppliers’ capabilities in supply chain and project management. The diversity of firms is, however, significant and underlines open innovation as a multi-faceted approach. The study further shows that innovation and economic performance are mainly explained by the intensity in partner collaboration and the depth of contents provided by the partners, while the number of partner is negatively correlated to performance.