Strategic orientations and open innovation adoption in European firms

Purpose This study examines the relationship between firms' strategic orientations and open innovation adoption. Specifically, it investigates whether different strategic priorities are associated with firms' engagement in open innovation activities. By integrating strategic management and open innovation perspectives, the study seeks to explain why some firms are more open to external knowledge flows than others. Design/methodology/approach The study uses microdata from the 2016 Community Innovation Survey (CIS), covering 97,543 enterprises from 14 European Union member states. Logistic regression models are employed to examine the associations between five strategic orientations and three forms of open innovation: goods, services, and process innovation. Firm size and export activity are included as control variables. Additional robustness analyses incorporating country and industry fixed effects are also conducted. Findings The study contributes to the literature by linking strategic orientations with open innovation adoption and providing large-scale empirical evidence from European firms. It extends existing research by showing that openness is not uniformly associated with all strategic orientations. The findings highlight the importance of strategic alignment in explaining heterogeneous patterns of open innovation adoption across firms. Originality/value The results reveal a strategically contingent pattern. Strategic orientations focused on product improvement, new product introduction, and customer-specific solutions are positively associated with open innovation adoption. In contrast, a low-price orientation is negatively associated with all forms of open innovation, while orientations focused on reaching new customer groups exhibit negative or statistically insignificant relationships. The robustness analyses confirm the stability of these findings.