Exploring ideation and implementation openness in open innovation projects: IT-enabled absorptive capacity perspective

Advancements in information technology (IT) have made organizational boundaries so porous, thereby resulting in a trend toward leveraging external knowledge for innovation. However, firms experience significant obstacles in drawing external knowledge. This study aims to disentangle the role of IT-enabled absorptive capacity in new product development performance. The research model was tested with survey data of open innovation projects from 152 firms. Our findings indicate that IT-enabled absorptive capability improves open innovation project performance in terms of new product innovativeness and product speed to market, but we do not detect a significant direct influence of openness on performance. Our findings also show that the interaction of IT-enabled absorptive capacity and ideation openness significantly amplifies new product innovativeness while the interaction of IT-enabled absorptive capacity and implementation openness accelerates the product speed to market. This study theoretically contributes by building an IT-enabled absorptive capacity theory in the open innovation context and uncovering the effects of two dimensions of openness. In practice, it offers managers strategies to successfully conduct open innovation projects in deploying effective ITs and leveraging various types of openness during the two phases.