Open innovation adoption: the role of technology exploration, technology exploitation and trust among SMEs and helices in triple helix model

Nowadays, it is almost impossible for businesses to craft competitive edges by pulling all in-house resources and capabilities alone. Innovation now demands a critical uplifting of a new dimension widely known as “open innovation”. Open innovation has been a main research focus and has mainly been targeted to large organizations where it have been proven to increase the organizations performance. As knowledge no longer resides within one particular industry alone, previous scholars have underlined the importance of embracing open innovation to SMEs to transform innovation processes. This study was constructed with the intention to look at the placement of open innovation among SMEs, specifically in the Malaysian triple-helix context. This study is developed to a threfold perspectives. Perspective I investigates the relationships of technology exploration, exploitation towards open innovation adoption and to investigate the mediating influence of trust on technology
exploration and exploitation towards open innovation adoption. Perspective II investigates the success factors and challenges for the organizations to achieve the difficulty levels of the constructs in the light of open innovation; while Perspective III profiles the organizations based on the constructs involved. A total of 72 Malaysian SMEs involved in a triple helix project were involved in this study. The data collection was gathered through a likert-scale instrument. Two major analyses were used. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and the Rasch Measurement were used to achieve the targeted perspectives. Result from Perspective I shows that technology exploration is significantly related to open innovation adoption and trust has also been proven to have a significant mediating relationship between technology exploration and open innovation adoption. Conversely, technology exploitation has proven insignificant relationship with open innovation adoption and has therefore resulted to trust having a non-significant mediating effect to the relationship of technology exploitation and open innovation adoption. Perspective II resulted to the division between success factors and challenges items while Perspective III indicated six distinct organizations profiles. Discussions of the study are based on latent characteristics shared by respective group. The findings of this study will assist SMEs; government; research bodies; industry players; and policy makers to
understand what motivates SMEs to adopt open innovation in the light of their ability level in dealing with various difficulties in technology exploration, exploitation and trust towards triple helices.