Researching Open Innovation: Macro and Micro Perspectives

Abstract

The general research questions guiding this thesis are twofold at the macro and micro level perspectives. At the macro level, the general research question is how open innovation influences the national systems of innovation. This study is conducted through a literature survey. At the micro level, this thesis intends to answer the question of how open innovation ( in terms of the channel-technology licensing) influences firms' technological learning in developing countries. I relied on a public database of Chinese firms to answer the latter question. For the empirical analyses, I take the largest developing country, China, as the research context, and employ the licensing data from China's States of Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), which is in charge of registering technology transfer contracts since the start of this century. To my knowledge, so far there is no appropriate dataset to study the learning process of Chinese firms based on prior licensing deals. Most existing publications therefore focus on case studies or rely on survey data. The database used in this thesis is unique and the available data published by the SIPO have been underexplored so far. ... In this thesis, I address two questions: one relates to the macro level and the other one to the micro level of analysis. At the macro level, although open innovation is increasingly popular among practitioners and scholars, an overview of its influence for national systems of innovation is still lacking. Therefore, the first purpose of this thesis is to achieve a better insight of how open innovation influences national systems of innovation. Towards this goal, the general research question can be defined by two specific lines of research: • How open innovation can be linked to national systems of innovation. Based on the results of the first line of research, the second can be presented as: • How open innovation influences national systems of innovation. The above two lines of research are answered through a literature survey. At the micro level, this thesis uses a unique dataset collected in China to investigate technology licensing deals, which is one of the most important channels enabling open innovation. Technology licensing is becoming a common instrument for firms. ...