The aim of the paper is to analyse the relationships between the openness degree of companies and their 1) context features, 2) R&D organization and 3) financial performances. Some hypotheses are formulated and tested on a sample of 126 world top R&D spending bio-pharmaceutical companies for the period 2008-2012, for a total of 630 statistical units. Our results suggest that open innovation is more pervasive among small and young companies, for most of which open innovation is the very core business. Inbound and outbound practices have a similar diffusion in terms of number of companies adopting them, but the cumulative values of inbound flows are higher, whereas outbound flows are more relevant when compared to the total business of the companies. Inbound practices are substitutive to internal R&D activities, while outbound ones are complementary to internal development. The performances of companies have an inverted-U shape trend versus inbound practices and a fundamentally decreasing trend versus outbound ones. The paper contributes to the research on open innovation by both providing an objective measurement system for open innovation based on the pecuniary flows deriving from open transactions and suggesting the relations between the open innovation adoption and the benefits deriving from it.
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