Open innovation activities and firm performance: A comparison between pre-crisis and post-crisis

Innovation played a relevant role in coping with the related economic-financial consequences of the 2008 crisis. In particular, several studies show the pivotal role of open innovation activities in responding to 2008 crisis-related downturn conditions. Remarkably, previous studies share several limitations. First, they leverage single-country data or single sectors to examine open innovation activities. Second, they examine open innovation activities and firm performance through binary comparisons between either pre-crisis and crisis or crisis and post-crisis periods. An overall view of how the outburst of a crisis altered the 2008 pre-crisis collaboration strategies and how such strategies changed after the 2008 crisis is a relevant gap in knowledge. This article addresses this gap in knowledge by examining open innovation activities and firms’ performance through a binary comparison between pre-crisis and post-crisis periods. In particular, this article analyses a repeated cross-sectional sample of firms from 13 European countries interviewed during 5 consecutive Community Innovation Survey waves. This article shows how after the crisis, European firms reduced – on average – the variety of their innovation partners. Such a loss was recovered only in 2012-2014. The outburst of a crisis seems negatively associated with the propensity towards open innovation and, specifically, with the number of different collaboration channels exploited by a firm to innovate. A crisis may urge firms to focus their energies on fewer collaboration channels to make the most out of them. The results also emphasise that the financial crisis temporarily reduced innovativeness. Interestingly, the results show that the positive relationship between collaboration breadth and innovation performance is more marked in the post-crisis wave for the firms more active in open innovation.