Open Innovation Profiles in Italian Manufacturing Companies

A new approach, characterized by the company’s ability to draw on a range of external sources to meet their needs for innovation, has been termed ‘open innovation’. The literature in recent years has investigated this new paradigm of open innovation, analyzing various aspects, such as the determinants (variables in terms of context and business strategies), changes in the innovation process, impact on performance and barriers to the development of this approach. Despite this, very few empirical analyses have been conducted and in general these analyses have not focused on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The study's objective is to identify and characterize different profiles of openness towards the external environment, and it has been conducted on Italian manufacturing firms, i.e. a context which is highly characterized by SMEs. A web-based online questionnaire survey was carried out and a database of 97 manufacturing companies was obtained. With regard to data elaboration, a K-means cluster analysis and a univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) were conducted to identify different profiles of open innovation and verify the significance levels of differences between clusters. First results suggest that two clusters with different levels of openness can be found. In the cluster analysis group membership is significantly influenced by open innovation, employees' innovation capability, internal open innovation practices, aggressive technology strategy, ICT adoption, employee development, and by context variables such as company size in terms of number of employees and performance. This study represents one of the few empirical studies on open innovation in SMEs, and also in Italian companies, and it intends to contribute to the understanding of the characteristics and implications of open innovation.