Promoting Future Sustainable Transition by Overcoming the Openness Paradox in KIE Firms

A key issue for transition to a more sustainable future is how to promote collaboration for innovation amongst multiple diverse partners. However, collaborating for innovation requires that firms overcome the paradox of openness, i.e., they need to be open to collaboration to innovate and at the same time protect their internal knowledge and intellectual assets to appropriate value from their innovations. The aim of this paper is to investigate how knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms can overcome this paradox—which is an important barrier to future transitions—by choosing a combination of collaborative partners and appropriability strategies that support their ability to create more radical innovations. We analyze a sample of over 2450 KIE firms, drawing from a cross-European survey. Our results indicate how different partners, and different appropriability strategies, are more, or less, relevant to the generation of the radical innovations needed to transform society into one with a sustainable future; university collaboration and the use of formal protection mechanisms seem especially important for such new-to-the-world innovations. Our study includes important policy implications for how to support and promote future sustainable transitions and also establishes a foundation for future lines of research regarding entrepreneurship and sustainable transition.