Assessing the Open Innovation Trends by Means of the Eurostat Community Innovation Survey

Many authors showed the benefits of open innovation (OI) to firms, consequently encouraging managers to adopt the OI paradigm to improve innovation performance. Nevertheless, whether firms have accepted such exhortations or not is almost empirically unexplored. The frequent claim that firms are increasingly adopting the OI paradigm is mostly anecdotal. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of firms' OI adoption by means of four waves of the community innovation survey, including 275,697 questionnaires. The analysis focuses on the trends in the use of inbound (internal use of external knowledge) and coupled (collaboration with partners) OI approaches. The results confirm that the share of firms adopting the OI paradigm has increased, both in terms of inbound and coupled OI actions. Similarly, firms have intensified the use of the inbound OI mode, whereas they have not intensified the use of collaborations. However, the analyses of different measures of OI show that in most cases the positive trends have not been monotonic, nor steep as they are anecdotally considered to be. © 2016 Imperial College Press