The mediating role of intellectual capital in open innovation in the service industries

Abstract

The paper intends to examine the mediating role of intellectual capital in the relation between the openness of service companies' search strategies and thr innovation performance. It models the relationship between external search strategies of open innovation and proposes how intellectual capital matters for openness strategies in the service industries. Moreover, the paper intends to expand the field of open innovation through exploring the mediating effect of intellectual capital. This paper fulfills an identified need to study how intellectual capital can be enabled in the open innovation of the service industries. Both Hierarchical Multiple Regression and the Structural Equation Model were employed to test the innovation model by the panel data of the second Taiwan Innovation Survey including 948 service firms. Empirical insights enable us to have a better understanding in terms of how service companies learn from external knowledge sources. This paper suggests that the impact of openness strategies on innovation performance becomes indirect through the partial mediator of intellectual capital so that innovation performance in service industry benefits from simultaneously incorporating intellectual capital with the efficient openness strategies. Finally, the paper includes implications for more insights into how service companies improve their innovative activities with external searching strategies and practices in terms of intellectual capital.