WHEN SPEED COUNTS, OPEN INNOVATION MATTERS

The importance of a firm’s collaborations on its performance is well recognized by open innovation literature. However, not all collaborations are equal. Adding to extant research on the breadth and depth of external sources of knowledge, this paper distinguishes among two types of collaborations, namely innovation-oriented and operational-oriented collaborations, on the basis of their scope and looks at their impact on reducing time-to-market, as an indicator of the firm’s performance. In doing it, it also considers the moderating role of two organizational capabilities, namely managerial capabilities and internationalization capability. A hierarchical multiple and moderated hierarchical multiple regressions are developed based on a composite dataset of 151 Tuscan (Italy) firms in the life science sector. The results show that a U-shaped relationship characterizes the impact of both collaborations on firm’s time-to-market, but also that this link is moderated by managerial and internationalization capabilities.