Firms' Behaviour on Open Innovation: A Recipe for Resilience in a Knowledge Driven Business Environment

Abstract

As the business environment becomes increasingly dynamic and critically complex, survival of the firm is vehemently threatened, on the complex and dynamic interplay of threats and opportunities. This paper extricates the survival behavioural tendencies of the firm, which found expression in open innovation', as an adaptive approach to adjust to external changes, using internal capabilities. The paper identifies open innovation as a knowledge resource apparatus, which involves a teleologic interchange and interactions on knowledge to accelerate the firm's innovative capabilities to expand market opportunities. The paper further identifies that the fundamental organizational level behaviour characteristic that enhances open innovation possibilities is the organizational structural pattern and the enabling or permissive organizational culture. The paper concludes that the survival of the firm amidst the apparent ‘certain uncertainties' in the environment depends largely on open innovation as a negative entropic behaviour of the firm. The paper also contends that until the firm is innovative in all spheres of its operations, it survival will be continually threatened.