Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) have been widely used in recent years to study open innovation (OI) activities, which have become a hot issue. While most research has aimed for a general overview of the OI activities in a specific country, this study, which pertains to OI activities in Taiwan, focuses on outstandingly innovative firms to benchmark and examine country-specific industrial characteristics, from which implications for innovation policies can be derived. Several findings emerge from our survey. First, Taiwan's outstanding firms have the best scores in regard to search breadth and depth dimensions, which indicate that in a small and export-oriented economy, these firms emphasize diverse information sources. A comparison of breadth and depth dimensions shows that they perform significantly better in the former than in the latter. Second, an analysis of the different categories of firms shows that manufacturing, SMEs and award-winners have more aggressive OI strategies than do service, large and non-award winners. Third, with respect to R&D factors, external innovation breadth is negatively correlated with R&D intensity, whereas depth indicators have a higher explanatory ability in regard to R&D expenditure. Finally, with respect to innovative performance, again external innovation depth is the main driver of the financial performance of companies. The implications for innovation policies are discussed.
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