Explain the adoption of open innovation practices by SMEs through strategic, organisational and environmental characteristics ; Expliquer l'adoption des pratiques d'innovation ouverte des PME par les caractéristiques stratégiques, organisationnelles et environnementales

The objective of this research is to explain the adoption of open innovation practices by SMEs by exploring the strategic, organisational and environmental characteristics of SMEs. We first of all lay the theoretical foundations for understanding the concept of open innovation and provide a better understanding of its specificity in the SME context. We then use a literature review process to identify twenty-two determinants, three innovation strategies and eleven open innovation practices and propose an integrative model for the adoption of open innovation in SMEs that links strategic, organisational and environmental characteristics to open innovation practices. After having justified our epistemological and methodological choices, namely the choice of a hypothetico-deductive approach anchored in a critical realistic positioning and a quantitative methodology, we verify the existence of a statistically significant link between the organisational, strategic and environmental characteristics of Norman SMEs and the adoption of open innovation practices. Our results show that exploitation is not correlated with open innovation practices and that ambidextrousness is positively correlated with open innovation practices. However, exploration is not correlated with open innovation practices since only co-design is negatively correlated with exploitation strategy and only venture capital is negatively correlated with exploitation strategy and positively correlated with ambidextrous. Other simple and multiple logistic regressions then identified the main organisational and environmental variables explaining the use of different open innovation practices. The results reveal that the structural and extra-organisational determinants are linked to the three open innovation logics, and that the inter-organisational determinants are significantly correlated to outside-in and coupled process but inside-out practices. The environmental determinants are significantly correlated to the practices of coupled process and inside-out, ...