Customer Dependence and Suppliers’ Strategic Knowledge Disclosure: Moderating Effects of Knowledge Accumulation and Market Competitiveness

Under the open-innovation paradigm, firms’ management of innovation output has surpassed traditional approaches such as confidentiality and patenting, evolving toward mechanisms such as strategic knowledge disclosure (SKD). As firms become increasingly embedded in global open-innovation networks, reconciling the tension between the need for innovation-knowledge disclosure and the reality of external-relationship embedding has emerged as a research agenda. Grounded in open-innovation theory, this study uses a panel of A-share manufacturing companies spanning 2009–2021 to examine how customer dependence (CD) affects suppliers’ SKD. Employing fixed-effects negative binomial panel regression, as well as robustness checks, we find that stronger CD significantly weakens suppliers’ SKD. Mechanism analysis shows that this effect operates through the channel of research and development (R&D) investment. Suppliers with high CD are more likely to reduce R&D investment, thereby suppressing their SKD. We further find that knowledge accumulation positively moderates the relationship between CD and suppliers’ SKD, while market competitiveness negatively moderates it. By constructing a theoretical framework for suppliers’ SKD under CD, this study enriches our understanding of the mechanisms and boundary conditions of firms’ SKD in terms of supply-chain relationships. The findings offer actionable insights to help suppliers embedded in supply-chain business partnerships formulate SKD.