Information technology and open innovation: A strategic alignment perspective

Advances in information technology (IT) have enabled firms to increasingly rely on open innovation. Although researchers and practitioners are interested in this phenomenon, there is a lack of theoretically driven research on how IT impacts organizational open innovation performance. Drawing on the strategic IT alignment perspective and related literature, we proposed a model to explain the performance of organizational open innovation; i.e., the alignment between IT strategies and the openness of open innovation strategies results in different outcomes for open innovation. Through the analysis of data from 225 firms in China, we found that the alignment between IT flexibility and breadth enhances innovation radicalness and innovation volume, whereas the alignment between IT integration and depth positively affects innovation volume only. Innovation volume and radicalness were found to enhance organizational performance in terms of sales growth. Our study contributes to the literature on open innovation and strategic alignment. Its findings also have important managerial implications for practitioners.