The open innovation paradigm brought forward by Henry Chesbrough offers a new way of thinking and managing about innovation. Literature on open innovation reveals little that to what extent different types of external partners in open innovation are combined to foster innovation. From the resource-based view, we unpack partner heterogeneity into three dimensions from organizational, industrial and national heterogeneity, corresponding to use of diverse knowledge from partners. This paper offers a comprehensive framework to reveal the relationship between partner heterogeneity and innovation performance, and it also gives a good direction for enterprises improving their innovation capability through utilizing external knowledge effectively according to their internal resources.
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