Cross-cultural strategic intelligence solutions for leveraging open innovation opportunities

Although the concept of open innovation has become widely discussed by scholars and practitioners, few cross-cultural studies focus on the assessment of companies’ behaviours towards “not invented here” and “not sold here” syndromes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the profiles of Japanese and Romanian companies operating in two fields, IT and manufacturing, from the open innovation perspective. The goal of this study is therefore to provide comprehensive empirical evidence for the adoption of inbound and outbound open innovation activities in the companies from these two target countries. Data from a sample of Japanese companies and Romanian companies were used to test two hypotheses on open innovation behaviour, in the context of a cross-cultural comparative approach. The results show that technology isolationists are more frequently found among the Romanian companies (especially in the manufacturing field), than the Japanese companies, which can be explained by the fact that Japanese firms are mainly based on leading innovative technologies, while Romanian firms are early adopters of the advanced technologies, due to the economic circumstances. Japanese companies included in the sample are defined as technology fountains, followed by technology brokers, proving their appetite for outbound open innovation. In this context, strategic intelligence solutions, once performed in collaborative culture environments, will lead to the improvement of the partners’ managerial competences and will act as enablers for competitive positioning, proving the added-value of the acquired know-how through open innovation practices.