EXTERNAL KNOWLEDGE SOURCING AND FIRMS PERFORMANCE: THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES AND MANAGEMENT PRACTICES.
Many current economic theories on innovation hold that individual firms are seldom capable of innovating independently and that the search for new product and process ideas goes beyond the firm?s boundaries to other firms or institutions (Cassiman and Veugelers, 2006; von Hippel, 1988). This idea has been embraced by the recent open innovation literature, which assumes that firms can and should use external knowledge sources for their innovation processes (Chesbrough, 2003; Laursen and Salter, 2006; Leiponen and Helfat, 2010).