Abstract
Integrating insights from the open innovation literature and organisational learning theory this paper proposes that economic, product/process and social organisational motives of innovation positively moderate the relationship between collaboration breadth innovation and performance (radical and incremental). Firms progressively open their boundaries to more innovation partners and increase their collaboration breadth to reach external knowledge, skills and resources and complement their innovation activities. We posit that collaboration breadth is not universally beneficial for innovation outputs. Rather, in a sample of 18,039 British firms it is empirically examined whether or not the effects of collaboration breadth to innovation performance are further enhanced when firms want to achieve specific innovation objectives. Results show that open firms collaborating in their innovation activities and are motivated by economic objectives will experience greater innovation performance. For product and process innovation motives a positive moderation effect is observed only for incremental innovation performance. No evidence is found on the contingent role of social motives. Hence, we argue that the benefits of collaboration breadth are dependent on both the type of innovation motives firms engage in open innovation activities for, and the type of innovation firms want to achieve. Our findings contribute to the open innovation literature and the ongoing discussion on the contingent role of openness, by stressing the important, but overlooked, role of innovation motives in shaping open innovation strategies. We also provide insights on the organisational learning theory by unfolding some of the learning mechanisms useful to overcome the drawbacks of external knowledge over-search. The practical implications of our research are discussed.