The impact of openness on innovation performance of China's firms: From the perspective of knowledge attributes

Chesbrough's open innovation paradigm offers a new way to develop innovation strategy. Open innovation could improve innovation performance, but too much openness would bring negative impacts to innovation performance due to the leakage of key technology, the searching cost and the transaction cost. This research tries to explore the relationship of openness and innovation performance of China's firms and find the moderating roles of the knowledge attributes of R&D projects. Based on the literature review and theoretic analysis, the paper discusses the influence of openness on innovation performance from the perspective of knowledge attributes, develops a conceptual model and generates six hypotheses worth further study. This study presents more profound insights on how knowledge attributes influence the effect of open innovation, which may add both academic and practical value to the field of open innovation.