Joint forces: Towards an integration of intellectual capital theory and the open innovation paradigm

Abstract

Intellectual capital (IC) is among the most long-lived topics in managerial literature. More recently, the emergence of the open innovation (OI) paradigm has encouraged the understanding that firms should collaborate with other organizations to leverage their own R&D capabilities. We propose that these two streams of managerial literature should join forces since the OI paradigm could be considered an approach to innovation with foundations in relational capital, facilitated by an appropriate level of human and structural capital. Surprisingly, few researchers attempted to put IC and OI into relation. Therefore, this paper has two main goals: providing a theoretical model that synoptically presents how IC and OI overlap and testing the theoretical model by analyzing how firms’ IC affects OI-related performance. We study a sample of 3,744 Spanish firms from the PITEC dataset. We show that the three IC constructs positively affect OI performance. Relational and human capital show diminishing returns on OI performance.