Managing Creativity for Absorptive Capacity: The NIH Syndrome and the Implementation of Open Innovation Business Model

The benefits of the open innovation business model and the absorptive capacity necessary to acquire and utilize external knowledge have been discussed extensively. An emerging literature stream has identified certain intra-organizational antecedents of absorptive capacity. However how firms recognize potentially valuable external knowledge to be able to start the knowledge absorption process has not been discussed. This paper suggests creativity management and argues that stimulating meaningfully novel behavior positively influences the recognition ability and the communication it enhances alleviates the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. Based on the absorptive capacity and organizational creativity literature a model consists of five hypotheses is derived and tested on a sample of 346 Danish SMEs. The results indicate that creativity management plays a positive role in the development of recognition ability.