How Innovation Strategies Affect the Role of Openness under Knowledge Spillovers?

The current study testified the impact of enterprises' innovation openness on their innovative capacity. Drawing on dual-process model, we suggested that enterprises with higher openness held a stronger innovative capacity and knowledge spillovers played a mediating role between openness and innovative capacity. We further proposed that firms might suffer a decline of innovativeness provided attaching excessive importance to exploitation rather than exploration. In order to examine our predictions, we used investigation data answered by middle or senior managers from 205 emerging enterprises in China, and then performed analyses by means of hierarchical regression. Consistent with supposed framework, we found that the effects of knowledge spillovers mediated the positive relationship between openness and innovative capacity. In addition, exploitative strategy negatively moderated the direct relationship between knowledge spillover effects and innovative capacity and the indirect relationship between openness and innovative capacity. Finally, the academic and practical implications of these findings as well as future research orientations are discussed.