The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent developments in the open innovation literature to explore whether the openness of SMEs to the four categories of external sources of information (ESI) is complementary, substitute or independent, while assessing the determinants of SMEs’ openness to these ESI.,This research is based on data from a survey of 451 manufacturing SMEs in the province of Quebec, Canada. Data have been elaborated through a multivariate probit model to empirically show that SMEs are considered to be simultaneously open to different ESI. The results of this study show significant heterogeneity in the determinants of SMEs’ openness to these ESI.,The study found that the SMEs’ openness to different ESI seems to be complementary rather than substitute; and not all variables included in the model explain the SMEs’ openness to the different ESI.,The paper provides practical implications for managers and policy makers including the SMEs’ managers’ role to recognize the consolidation of different ESI jointly instead of separately. Furthermore, managers and policy makers should attempt to provide a fair context to SMEs to manage their openness ecosystem.,This study is virtually the first to investigate both the complementarity and the determinants of SMEs’ openness to different ESI using a sophisticated econometric model.

中文翻译：

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关于中小型企业如何开放外部信息源的探索性研究

本文的目的是借鉴开放式创新文献的最新发展，探讨中小企业对四类外部信息源（ESI）的开放性是互补，替代还是独立的，同时评估了中小企业开放性的决定因素这些研究是基于加拿大魁北克省451家制造业中小型企业的调查数据得出的。通过多元概率模型对数据进行了细化，以凭经验表明中小型企业被认为同时对不同的ESI开放。这项研究的结果表明，中小企业对这些ESI开放性的决定因素存在显着的异质性。研究发现，中小企业对不同ESI的开放性似乎是互补的，而不是替代的。并不是模型中包含的所有变量都说明了中小企业对不同ESI的开放性。本文为管理人员和决策者提供了实际的启示，包括中小企业管理人员扮演的角色，他们认识到联合而不是分别地合并不同的ESI。此外，管理人员和政策制定者应该尝试为中小企业提供一个公平的环境来管理其开放性生态系统。