The marginal effect of external technologies on innovation speed under complexity

Yeolan Lee and Eric A. Fong

Technovation, 2025, vol. 140, issue C

Abstract: Many organizations use external components in open innovation (OI) projects, which impacts their innovation search time. This paper builds theory about how innovation search time changes as OI projects adopt an increasing number of external components for innovation activity. It further examines how complexity moderates the relationship between the number of external components and innovation search time. Using a sample of 276 pharmaceutical product development projects, we found that complexity is an important moderator. Our results show that under low complexity there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of external components and innovation search time. In contrast, under high complexity, there is a U-shaped relationship between the number of external components and innovation search time. Our results provide implications regarding the marginal effect of external technologies on innovation search time under varying degrees of complexity.

Keywords: Technology license; Complexity; Speed; Drug development time; Open innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497224001950
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:techno:v:140:y:2025:i:c:s0166497224001950

DOI: 10.1016/j.technovation.2024.103145

Access Statistics for this article

Technovation is currently edited by Jonathan Linton

More articles in Technovation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().