A Review on Open Innovation and Absorptive Capacity in Small and Medium

Enterprises during the last decade – Analyzing Bibliometrics to Understand

the Development of the Field

Emil C.H. Ip
Laboratory of Applied Neurosciences. University of Saint Joseph, Macau SAR, China,
emil.marques@usj.edu.mo
João Alexandre Lobo Marques
Laboratory of Applied Neurosciences. University of Saint Joseph, Macau SAR, China,
alexandre.lobo@usj.edu.mo
Bruno Riccelli dos Santos Silva
Federal University of Ceará , Fortaleza – Ceará, Brazil,
bruno@lesc.ufc.br
Paulo Cesar Cortez
Federal University of Ceará , Fortaleza – Ceará, Brazil,
cortez@lesc.ufc.br
Álvaro Barbosa
University of Saint Joseph, Macau SAR, China,
abarbosa@usj.edu.mo

l Computer systems organization~Real-time system~Real-time system architecture

High Relevance
l Human-centered computing~HCI design and evaluation methods
High Relevance
l Applied computing~Health informatics
Medium Relevance

Abstract: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can benefit significantly from open innovation by gaining access to
a broader range of resources and expertise using absorptive capacitive, and increasing their visibility and reputation.
Nevertheless, multiple aspects impact their capacity to absorb new technologies or adapt to develop them.This paper aims
to perform an analysis of relevant topics and trends in Open Innovation and Absorptive Capacity in SMEs based on a
bibliometric review identifying relevant authors and countries, and highlighting significant research themes and trends.
The defined string query is submitted to the Web of Science database, and the bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer
software. The results indicate that the number of scientific publications has consistently increased during the past decade,
indicating a growing interest of the scientific community, reflecting the industry interest and possibly adoption of Open
Innovation, considering Absorptive. This bibliometric analysis can provide insights on the most relevant regions the
research areas are under intensive development.

Keywords: Open innovation, Absorptive Capacity, SMEs, Bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer

1 INTRODUCTION

Understanding the value creation processes at work within a firm is crucial to understanding firm
competitiveness within the context of competitive advantage (Porter 1990). One way to achieve this is to
achieve innovation through higher-order processes, such as open innovation initiatives and absorptive
capacity (Zobel, 2017).
As proposed by Chesborough (2003), the concept of Open Innovation relates to the use of purposive
inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation. The firm should focus on developing
innovation that will drive expansion in its product markets. (Chesborough 2003). In essence, Open Innovation
is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas, internal ideas, and internal and
external paths to market as they look to advance their product technologies. This idea of external resources
and knowledge is not new.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can benefit significantly from open innovation by gaining
access to a broader range of resources and expertise and increasing their visibility and credibility in their
respective industries. Nevertheless, multiple aspects impact their capacity to absorb new technologies or
adapt to develop them.
The capacity to recognize external competencies, to assimilate and apply them is the concept of
Absorptive Capacity, introduced by Cohen and Levinthal (Cohen and Levinthal 1989, Cohen and Levinthal
1990). Thus, absorptive capacity can be viewed as an internal process or capacity to reach out for external
resources. Nelson and Winter(1982) termed these as "routines" or "processes" that represent the core
abilities of the firm and are referred to as the firm's ability to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and
external competencies to address rapidly changing environments. (Teece, Pisano, & Suen, 1997) Dynamic
Capabilities thus reflect the organization's ability to achieve new and innovative forms of competitive
advantage. (Leonard-Barton, 1992).
Absorptive capacity alone does not complete the means of reaching out and innovating. In light of
exploring the connections between open innovation and absorptive capacity in product development, it
becomes essential to identify the routines and processes within local firms that form a competitive advantage
of firms within markets in transition. This work is part of a broader research initiative that will explore the
open innovation processes and the absorptive capacity of firms from the Greater Bay Area, Hong Kong, and
Macau in China and how forces from the institutional theory relate to those processes.
The main objective of this paper is to analyze the relevant topics and trends in Open Innovation related
explicitly to the Absorptive Capacity in the context of SMEs, utilizing a bibliometric approach to identify the
most impactful authors and countries. Furthermore, the study will highlight significant research themes and
identify trends, based on keyword and citations analysis, along with their respective clusters.

2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
A bibliometric approach was designed to comprehensively analyze Open Innovation integrated with
Absorptive Capacity for Small and Medium Enterprises, as presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Research methodology employed in this work

 In addition, the most relevant research topics are presented based on the analysis of keywords, with
corresponding groups and temporal evolution. Finally, the paper will provide suggestions and insights for
possible gaps and opportunities for the research topic.
The Web of Science served as our data source library because it catalogs articles from pertinent
conferences and journals across various fields such as economics, administration, computer science, medicine,
and engineering, encompassing multidisciplinary studies. Moreover, it indexes more than 22,000 journals
and 50 million publications in 70 languages and 151 research categories.
Considering the aforementioned objective, we used a set of keywords involving terms related to open
innovation, SMEs, and absorptive capacity. The keywords mentioned in Figure 1 were considered to define
the search query (SQ), applied to the Web of Science digital library as follows:
SQ: (TS = (open innovation OR open-innovation) AND TS = (SMEs) AND TS= ("absorptive capacity")).
After that, we applied the string query to the Web of Science, exported the results, and performed a
bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer software. First, we performed a descriptive analysis of the collected
data, such as the number of publications per year, per country, and WOS category. Additionally, we analyzed
four maps provided by VOSviewer software:
• Co-occurrence map based on text data
• Citation per document
• Citation per country
• Bibliographic coupling
The co-occurrence analysis involves identifying pairs of words that appear together frequently in a set
of title and abstract documents. The citation per document analysis consists of looking at the number of
citations that a particular document has received and then calculating an average number of citations per
document across the entire set of documents we are analyzing. In the same direction, citations per country
analyze the number of citations different countries have received. Finally, the bibliographic coupling analysis
aims to create a map showing the relationships between documents based on their shared citations.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

The results are presented and discussed in this section according to the proposed methodology.
3.1 Subsection Publications by Year
Figure 2 presents the number of publications per year, according to the collected data.

Figure 2: Number of publications by year

 Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in publications related to open innovation in
SMEs. Data from the Web of Science database shows that in 2012 there were only around 5 publications,
whereas in 2019, there were 31 and kept stable until 2022. This upward trend indicates that the study of
open innovation in SMEs is gaining momentum in the scientific community and becoming a topic of interest.
Overall, the increase in publications related to open innovation and SMEs suggests growing interest and
investment in research and development in this area. The fluctuation in growth rates in 2020 may reflect
the impact of external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic on this research field.

3.2 Publications by country

Figure 3 presents the number of publications in the WoS database for the most relevant countries.

Figure 3: Number of publications by country

Based on the number of publications per country in the open innovation and SMEs area, Italy has 28
publications, indicating a strong research focus and output in this field. England, China, and Spain have a
considerable number of publications, with 22, 17, and 17, respectively. France and South Korea are tied with
14 publications, which suggests that research on open innovation and SMEs is also of interest in these
countries. On the other hand, Germany, India, Russia, Scotland, Belgium, Colombia, and Austria have fewer
publications, but this still means a research focus on the area since they are ahead of the vast majority of other
global economies.

3.3 Case study - Publications by year in China

As a case study for this paper, China was selected to analyze the increasing interest and development of
the field. Figure 4 presents the number of publications by year in China in the last decade.
 Figure 4: Number of publications by year in China

The results suggest that the number of publications related to open innovation and SMEs in China has
gradually increased over the past few years. In 2012 and 2014, no publications in this area indicated that it
was not a significant research focus at the time. 2019 there were two publications, which increased to three
in 2020 and four in 2021 and 2022. These results suggest that open innovation and SMEs are becoming
increasingly important research areas in China and that the country is investing more resources into studying
these topics.

3.4 Number of publications by WoS categories

Figure 5 illustrates the number of publications according to the Web of Science categories over the last
decade.

Figure 5: Number of publications according to WoS categories

The results indicate that most publications related to open innovation and SMEs fall within the categories of
Management and Business, with 104 and 62 publications, respectively, which is expected.
Other categories with significant numbers of publications include Engineering Industrial (19), Economics
(13), and Operations Research Management Science (12), indicating that research on open innovation and
SMEs also extends to related disciplines such as engineering and economics.
There are also a few categories with smaller numbers of publications, such as Environmental Studies (7),
Information Science Library Science (9), and Agricultural Economics Policy (3), which suggest that
researchers are exploring the intersection between open innovation, SMEs, and related areas such as
environmental sustainability and information management.
These results suggest that research on open innovation and SMEs is a multidisciplinary field, with
contributions from various disciplines such as business, management, engineering, and economics. The
diversity of categories with publications also highlights the interdisciplinary nature of research in this area
and the potential for collaboration across fields.

3.5 Relevant keywords

The map presented in Figure 6 illustrates the most used words in the Title and Abstract fields found in
the collected results.

Figure 5: Title and abstract keywords

Out of a total of 3481 terms, a threshold of at least 20 occurrences per term was chosen, resulting in 51
terms. The top 31 most relevant terms were displayed in a figure. Additionally, the terms were grouped into
four clusters. The largest cluster, highlighted in red, consisted of 12 items related to SMEs and Knowledge.
The green cluster, with 8 items, was related to innovation, absorptive capacity, and performance. The
smallest cluster, indicated by yellow, consisted of 4 items related to strategy and relationship.

3.6 Analysis of Citations

The number of citations is a key indicator for analyzing the impact of publications. Figure 6 presents a
map with the number of citations per document. A threshold of 10 was used as the minimum number of
citations of a paper.
 Figure 6: Citations by documents

Out of 162 documents, a threshold of at least 10 citations per document was chosen, resulting in 84
documents. The top 63 most relevant papers are presented in Figure 6. Additionally, the documents were
grouped into ten clusters. The most significant cluster, emphasized in red, comprised nine publications. The
green cluster consisted of 8 documents, while the smallest cluster, indicated by salmon, consisted of only 3
documents.

3.7 Citation by country analysis

Besides the number of publications per country, presented in Figure 2, the number of citations is also
essential to analyze since it can measure the impact of these publications. Concerning citations by country,
Figure 7 illustrates the map containing the most cited countries obtained in our results

Figure 7: Citations by country

Out of 57 countries, a threshold of at least one citation per country was chosen, resulting in 57
documents. The top 50 most relevant countries are displayed in Figure 7. Additionally, the countries were
grouped into eleven clusters. The largest cluster, emphasized in red, comprised 10 countries. The green
cluster comprised 8 countries, while the others comprised six or fewer countries. The smallest cluster
consisted of only Taiwan.
Regarding citations, Italy published 28 documents containing 1165 citations, while Sweden submitted
only 4 documents with 635 citations. This suggests that the works from both countries are significant in the
relevant literature. China, on the other hand, presented 17 documents with 181 citations, highlighting the
importance of open innovation as a relevant research topic in this country.

3.8 Bibliographic coupling – Documents

As previously mentioned, the bibliography coupling technique aims to identify tendencies concerning
the references used by authors. Figure 8 presents the bibliographic coupling with documents as the unit of
analysis. A threshold of minimum 10 citations was chosen.
The top 84 most relevant documents are displayed in Figure 8. Additionally, the documents were
grouped into four clusters, indicating a high correlation between the references. The biggest cluster,
emphasized in red, comprised 32 documents. The green and blue clusters comprised 24 documents, while the
yellow comprised 4 papers.

3.9 Bibliographic coupling – Authors

Concerning bibliographic coupling by authors, figure 9 illustrates the map containing the most frequent
authors obtained in our results.

Figure 8: Bibliographic coupling - Documents

 Figure 9: Bibliographic coupling – Authors

The top 55 most relevant authors were displayed in a figure. Additionally, the authors were grouped into
seven clusters. The most significant cluster, emphasized in red, comprised 15 authors. The green cluster
consisted of 14 authors, while the other clusters consisted of 8 authors or less. The smallest cluster consisted
of only three authors.

4 CONCLUSION
In this article, we propose a bibliometric approach to understand the development of the area of Open
Innovation together with the concept of Absorptive Capacity in Small and Medium Enterprises around the
world during the last decade with some specific analysis of the case of China.
Some key highlights can be stated to achieve the proposed objective:
• The number of publications has consistently increased during the past decade, indicating a
growing interest of the scientific community, reflecting the industry interest and possibly
adoption of Open Innovation, considering Absorptive Capacity on SMEs
• For the case study of China, it is the fourth country in the number of publications, with a similar
trend of increasing the number of publications in the last four years. A total of 17 documents
with 181 citations were identified.
• Finally, the analyses of the bibliography coupling of documents and authors indicate that there
are clear clusters connected to the most relevant countries previously identified and these are
the works contributing to the industry development.
As a limitation, our data collection was limited to the WOS core collection dataset, which is a high-quality
ranking database. Still, it may omit interesting works in the field that were not indexed by this database.
Future works might consider a more detailed analysis of the most relevant countries and other international
indexing databases, such as Scopus. Finally, additional search queries shall be used to expand the analysis to
other key topics in the field.
5 REFERENCES

[1] Porter, M. E. (1990). New global strategies for competitive advantage. Planning Review, 18(3), 4-14.
[2] Zobel, A. K. (2017). Benefiting from open innovation: A multidimensional model of absorptive capacity. Journal of product
innovation management, 34(3), 269-288.

[3] Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive capacity: A new perspective on learning and innovation.
Administrative science quarterly, 128-152.
[4] Chesbrough, H. W. (2003). Open innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology. Harvard
Business Press.
[5] Nelson, R. R., & Winter, S. G. (1982). The Schumpeterian tradeoff revisited. The American Economic Review, 72(1),
114-132.
[6] Teece, D.J., Pisano, G., Shuen, A. (1997). Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management, Strategic Management
Journal, Vol. 18, No. 7 9 Aug.,1997), pp. 509-533.
[7] Leonard-Barton, D. (1992). Core capabilities and core rigidities: A paradox in managing new product development.

Strategic management journal, 13(S1), 111-125.

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