This paper develops an indicator framework for examining open innovation practices and their impact on performance. The analysis, which is based on Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data for Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Norway, yields a number of interesting results. First, we find that open innovation practices have a strong impact on innovation performance. Second, results suggest that broad-based approaches yield the strongest impacts, and that the collective of open innovation strategies appear more important than individual practices. Third, intramural investments are still important for innovative performance, stressing that open innovation is not a substitute for internal knowledge building.

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The evolutionary turn in economic geography has shed new light on historically contingent regional preconditions for innovation and economic growth, which has the potential of improving the analytical input to regional innovation system approaches. Evolutionary economic geography has renewed interest in and sharpened the conceptual lens on firms, their organizational routines and knowledge bases as well as the long-term, self-sustaining development dynamics, which may arise from their co-location in regions. At the same, it has been pointed out that an overreliance on imported evolutionary frameworks (such as Nelson and Winter's theory of the firm and their lack of an explicit social ontology) may lead to a 'theoretical relegation' of institutions and agency. It seems also that the policy agenda of evolutionary economic geography has remained largely implicit. In comparison, regional innovation system has been developed in closer interaction with policy-makers and has been used widely as a framework for the design, implementation and evaluation of regional innovation policies in a variety of countries and regions. The purpose of this article is to critically investigate what evolutionary economic geography brings to the policy table, and how this potentially can advance a regional innovation systems approach. The article specially focuses on how this may improve the capacity of policies based on a regional innovation system framework to support new path development (i.e. path renewal and path creation) to secure regional resilience.

This paper investigates the relationship between new product introduction, and three constructs (search, collaboration and external R&D) developed to capture the different means by which firms link internal R&D to external inputs. By including interaction effects and applying detailed marginal effects analysis, it sheds new light on a research question, which has generated much empirical ambiguity. Search diversity and collaboration diversity measure the extent to which different types of information sources and collaboration partners are used. Both affect innovation performance positively, and are complementary to each other. External R&D measures the relative importance of contract R&D, and is found to have a conditional negative impact which is reduced by search and reinforced when combined with collaboration. When including interaction effects involving the overall R&D intensity of firms, our findings suggest the existence of two competing ideal types of open innovation strategy and organization.