Open innovation and company culture: Internal openness makes the difference Jan Kratzer a,b , Dirk Meissner b, ⁎, Vitaly Roud b a Technische Universtitaet Berlin, Moscow, Germany b National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation abstract article info Article history: Received 7 February 2017 Received in revised form 13 March 2017 Accepted 15 March 2017 Available online xxxx There is a common agreement that innovation is driven by the people that form the heart of any company's in- novation activity. Still, people perform innovation in a special institutional environment characterized by rules and regulations that might support or impede innovation. The open innovation paradigm expects companies to engage in external relationships for innovation; however companies often neglect the actual internal openness of employees, which is an absolute must before partnering with external partners. The article finds that company innovation culture comes in five main forms: closed innovation (driven by internal capabilities); doing, using, interacting (ad hoc processes, no link to knowledge providers); outsourcing innovation capabilities; extramural innovation, no matching internal culture/procedures and proactive innovation (match of internal and external openness). The empirical analysis shows that the closed innovation behavior is by far the most widespread among Russian companies whereas proactive innovation behavior remains an exception in the overall sample. © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Open innovation Company culture Human resource for innovation Innovation climate Innovation culture 1. Introduction The term “open innovation” (OI) has been discussed in the litera- ture for over a decade. This term encompasses the most important changes in company innovation activities, which can be character- ized as more distributed, multidisciplinary, trans-border, cross- institutional and inter-temporal processes than in the 20th century, all contained in one conceptual framework (Bianchi et al., 2011; Chiaroni et al., 2011; Dahlandera and Gann, 2010; Huizingh, 2011). This framework postulates that innovation is significantly beyond R&D activities alone, instead it views innovation as a result of the smart and targeted combined use and application of knowledge and competences with special emphasis on the willingness to inte- grate third parties' knowledge and abilities into one organizations' activities (Vanhaverbeke and Cloodt, 2014). In such a broad sense the main understanding of ‘ open innovation’ implies that innova- tions result from the sharing of competences between different players along and beyond the value chain, with deep implications for a company's external relationships (Chesbrough, 2003; Chesbrough et al., 2006). In particular, new forms of complements between private and public research arise as a result of the need to reconcile speed in the commercial exploitation of new ideas on high- ly competitive global markets with continuous investments and long lead-times to develop radical innovation capabilities. Therefore, innovators need to accumulate competences and resources to ex- ploit the opportunities that arise from multi-faceted demands. Although the required knowledge increases exponentially, the opportunities for innovative responses to more diverse demands have grown even more rapidly (Ferrary, 2011). This, however, re- quires different competences and perceptions of innovation by inno- vators, which share the common features of complex underlying user needs and the respective application (market knowledge) and technological knowledge. In this respect, the open innovation para- digm emphasizes a two-directional knowledge and technology transfer by simultaneously opening the innovation process inward and outward instead of either in-source knowledge and technologies (inward) or the use of multiple exploitation paths for innovation, knowledge and technology, and thus inventions (Brunswicker and Vanhaverbeke, 2015). However, it is important to recall the basics features of almost any kind of innovation: this means the combina- tion of knowledge and technologies that exist or are developed and generated for special purposes (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Doz et al., 2004). Knowledge and technology in turn are developed and generated by people, which highlights the centrality and importance of the human factor within the innovation process and hence for in- novation management. Innovative efforts are typically executed using a project-management approach, with teams as the organiza- tional nucleus (Griffin, 1997; Leenders et al., 2007). Like other crucial organizational outcomes, innovative outcomes of the teams stem not only from overall firm strategy and access to resources but, more fundamentally, from the minds of the individual employees who, with others, carry out the work on a daily basis (Amabile et al., Technological Forecasting & Social Change xxx (2017) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: dmeissner@hse.ru (D. Meissner). TFS-18898; No of Pages 11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.03.022 0040-1625/© 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Technological Forecasting & Social Change Please cite this article as: Kratzer, J., et al., Open innovation and company culture: Internal openness makes the difference, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.03.022