Purpose: Through a comprehensive review of the literature on open innovation (OI), this study aimed to achieve two objectives: (1) to identify the main thematic areas discussed in the past and track their evolution over time; and (2) to provide recommendations for future research avenues.Design/methodology/approach: To achieve the first objective, a method based on text mining was implemented, with the analysis focusing on 1,772 journal articles published between 2003 and 2018. For the second objective, a review based on recent and relevant papers was conducted for each thematic area.Findings: The paper identified nine thematic areas explored in existing research: (1) context-dependency of OI, (2) collaborative frameworks, (3) organizational dimensions of OI, (4) performance and OI, (5) external search for OI, (6) OI in small and medium-sized enterprises, (7) OI in the pharmaceutical industry, (8) OI and intellectual property rights, and (9) technology. The analysis of the most recent papers belonging to the more investigated areas offers suitable suggestions for future research avenues.Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no review has yet been undertaken to reorganize the OI literature.

The literature on open innovation (OI) is characterised by studies based both on large companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Among all, one of the less explored issues in SMEs is what impedes them to adopt OI. Thus, this paper has the threefold objective to identify which factors hinder the adoption of OI in SMEs, to investigate if different behaviours exist among SMEs in relation to these factors, and to understand if the same factors effectively influence the level of adoption of OI. Based on a survey on 157 Italian SMEs, we identified four main barriers (namely, ‘knowledge’, ‘collaboration’, ‘organisational’, and ‘financial and strategic’) and three profiles of firms, different in terms of innovativeness of the industries they belong to (knowledge intensive, medium-innovative, and less innovative) and hampering factors perceived (‘knowledge’, ‘financial and strategic’, and ‘collaboration’ and ‘organisational’ barriers). Moreover, we found that some of these factors effectively impede the adoption of the paradigm.

Innovation has become a prime source for gaining a competitive edge in the market for all companies. This study seeks to investigate the effect of innovation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) on their financial performance, as well as the effect of firm size on the impact of innovation. To examine empirically this relationship, data were collected via a survey of a sample of 98 SMEs belonging to the food machinery industry, and analyzed using a regression-based analysis. The empirical findings confirm that an increase in the innovation level increased financial performance. Specifically, they underline the relevance of the innovation developed in order to meet the customers’ needs as well as of those developed in order to differentiate from the competitors in improving the financial performance. Moreover, results suggest that in SMEs the level of technology adopted to develop innovation does not impact on the financial performance.