Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to answer the following two questions: What are the influences of the top managers’ different leadership styles on organizational innovation? What is the mechanism by which the different leaderships exert different effects on organizational innovation?Design/methodology/approach: To test the hypothesized model, a data set based on 133 MBA part-time students from Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University in China was built, after interviewing several top managers as a pilot study. With the help of SPSS macro, hierarchical regression and bootstrapping analysis, the paper analyzes the effects of two leadership styles on innovation performance, through the mediation mechanism of openness involving open breadth and open depth.Findings: The results indicate that transformational leadership enhances, while transactional leadership reduces, the organizational innovation performance. The openness breadth and openness depth not only mediate the beneficial effect of transformational leadership on innovation, but also mediate the deleterious effect of transactional leadership on innovation.Originality/value: This study empirically explores the different functions of transformational leadership and transactional leadership for leading organizational innovation performance. Furthermore, a new form of organization is an open design or strategy that allows more external knowledge and resources to be absorbed, which is claimed as a new paradigm for organization innovation. This study integrates the concepts of breadth of openness and depth of openness on the basis of open innovation literature, as an intermediate mechanism to explain the different effects of the two forms of top managers’ leadership.

The conflict between “faster, better and cheaper” and high environment uncertainty forces firms to choose between different product innovation strategies. This study shows that firms can develop strategic ambidexterity in product innovation (SAPI) through diverse product innovation strategies, by effectively exploiting internal and external resources as well as their combination. The work explores the relationship between the interplay of external knowledge sources and internal information sharing for SAPI in 600 small- and medium-sized Chinese manufacturing enterprises. The results show knowledge breadth and depth and information sharing are positively related to SAPI, which tends to increase when knowledge depth is associated with information sharing. The study contributes to new product development (NPD) literature by introducing the concept of strategic ambidexterity in product innovation, and exploring the roles of external knowledge sources and internal information sharing, and their complementarity, on the ability to develop firm-level SAPI. It further provides implications for open innovation studies.

The article uses a longitudinal case study of China’s high-speed rail from the sectoral system perspective to show how a latecomer achieves catch up in the context of complex products and systems (CoPS). Results indicate the coevolution among high-speed train CoPS, the complementary assets, and government engagement are important to the sectoral system’s catch up. To achieve catch up, a latecomer can choose a strategy in which the complementary assets take precedence over the CoPS, and the coordination of the two systems is maintained with government engagement. In addition, two elements involving the sectoral system’s knowledge base and government engagement play fundamental roles enabling the evolution of the competences of the CoPS and the leverage of complementary assets for catch up. The article contributes to the literature on catch up in the CoPS context using a sectoral system framework.