Technological and Non-technological Innovation: Open Innovation Decisions and The Moderating Role of Research Systems

Technological and non-technological innovation efforts hinge on internal orientations for multiple reasons- trust security and affordability. However, studies oriented to the immediate and future returns on decisions to innovate openly and internally have been largely unavailable. This paper addresses this gap using panel data from European Innovation Scoreboard (2011-2019). We verified whether the decisions of firms to adopt internal innovation or innovate openly affect technological and/or non-technological innovation output at different time periods. Our results show that internal and open innovation efforts reveal varying influences for different periods on SMEs whilst the availability of research systems adversely affect efforts of cooperation towards innovation. The novelty of this research is that it offers insights into the immediate and short-term impact of firms’ mutually exclusive decisions to innovate openly or collaborative and how these decisions are moderated by the existing research system.