From Internal to External: An Integrated Theoretical Framework for Open Innovation

The traditional resource-based view (RBV) accentuates the heterogeneous and imperfect mobile resources serve as key determinants of the competitiveness of organizations. However, social capital theory seems to be advocated leveraging the resources residing in the relationships among individuals to facilitate the organizational performances. The open innovation product, i.e., an Open Source Software (OSS) project or an user-centric software like mobile application, consists of a group of self-organizing individuals who collaboratively co-create an innovation. Much of our understandings of OSS an open innovation is based on studies that focused on the internal resources (i.e., on the co-workers predominantly) leaving little regards to the fact that such an open innovation organization functions in a larger community of projects and people. In this regard, it is imperative to jointly build upon the RBV and social capital theory to take a broader, embracing investigation of an open innovation, i.e. open source software (OSS), system to unveil how internal and external resources can facilitate the innovation legitimacy. In particular, the internal resources include the tangible resources, such as workforce and extent of contribution, and intangible resource like governance structure. The external resources include diverse forms of social capital, such as structural, cognitive, and relational social capital. This ongoing work proposed a theoretical framework to articulate how the interplay between internal and external resources can promote the innovation legitimacy.