Strategies to Foster Open Innovation in Malaysian Small and Medium Enterprises

Innovation has long been considered as a prominent growth engine to brace competitiveness of the firm in the market. Innovation plays a key role in providing sustainability and growth for the company. But yet firms are not clear about the type of innovation management practices that need to be adopted for generating an idea and developing a product. A shortened product life cycle, constantly growing research and development costs, more rapid information flows, and increasingly interconnected customers have supported a paradigm shift toward an open approach to innovation. A firm needs to choose between Open Innovation (OI) practices and Closed Innovation practices for sustainable development. OI has become one of the most recent topics for research in the area of innovation management. OI is a pioneering mechanism with an increasing number of studies in literature with large organizations and in the context of Europe and the West. There are still a number of issues unclear in OI Theory due to its wide range of concepts. This paper aims to critically review the existing literature and develop a conceptual framework to establish a relationship between Firms, OI Practices, SME Characteristics, and firm performance. The paper establishes a need for studies in the area of OI among small and medium segments of the technology-oriented industry. The paper also presents the research questions and research objectives of the study along with hypotheses and concludes with the need for research and the contribution that will be made from this study to the world of academia.