Innovation speed: Does open innovation expedite corporate venturing?

Open innovation has become an alternative framework to study how firms benefit from opening their boundaries and enable inflows and outflows of knowledge. Yet there is insufficient understanding of the factors that explain and predict differences in innovation speed when collaborating with external scientific and market partners. This paper is to our knowledge the first study presenting an empirical analysis about innovation speed of open and closed innovation projects executed by global research labs of a large multinational corporation for corporate venturing and core business units. Our analysis reveals that open innovation speeds innovation projects and it is particularly relevant to accelerate the offset the lack of innovation speed for corporate venturing projects. Further, market partners are beneficial to expedite the successful transfer of innovation projects from research labs to development units while scientific partners do not have an effect on the speed of innovation. All these contributions have implications for corporate venturing units, project managers and numerous academic communities.