(Dis)Engagement in open innovation: understanding focal actor's agentic socio-cognitive processes

Firms need to continuously innovate to remain relevant and competitive. In the last two decades, an organisational practice of open innovation (OI) has been promoted as the means to create and capture value in innovation processes. The central tenet of OI is that no individual has control or access to all of the useful knowledge. Be it the recent stories of Siemens opening up its additive manufacturing network to create medical devices during global crisis, or the long-standing collaborative value creation practices of innovation at LEGO and GE, examples of OI can be found in most sectors. However, OI is no guarantee for success in innovation pursuits, with relevance often related to specific contexts. In practice, OI becomes discernible through focal actors' openness to KSS (individuals tasked to bring OI to fruition). This requires focal actors to employ cognitive mechanisms that can help manage bias, beliefs about own abilities and that of others; to cope with frustration, failure, and negative attitudinal tendencies. Indeed, several cases of focal actors' engagement and disengagement (hereafter (dis)engagement) in OI initiatives have been popularised - from successes at P&G's Develop + Connect program, Enel's green energy initiatives and BBVA's Open Talent-Open Innovation platform; to stories of failure at ElectriCo, Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia and Boeing. A recent large-scale study suggests that more focal actors are now withdrawing from OI initiatives after first having actively engaged with it. Other OI studies have provided examples of individual's rejecting, underutilising, withdrawing or even sabotaging KSS activities in OI. These studies have highlighted that (dis)engagement responses in OI are a function of individual's cognition and ability to perform in KSS activities. That said, extant literature at the intersection of cognition and OI has primarily focused on object-level or subpersonal aspects - 1) processes that constrain cognitive flexibility and, 2) cognitive capacities that explain individual's ability to absorb knowledge and shape collective innovation performance. Explanations of variations in individual's (dis)engagement in OI have been limited to predispositions, heuristics, goal orientation and institutionalised social practices. Yet, as agents, focal actors have the capacity to exercise control over own cognitive processes and actions, and effect change in (dis)engagement responses through mechanisms that preserve preferred self in relation to in-role demands. The notion that focal actors are self-influencing agents has been set aside in extant OI literature. As a result, we know little about what characterises and informs focal actors' object-level or subpersonal processes in the OI setting. In this thesis, personal agency and the notion of self-referent meta-level cognitive mechanisms are central to the conceptualisation of (dis)engagement in OI. Specifically, this thesis draws attention to the interconnections between personal level and subpersonal processes. Within the broader cognition in OI conversations it contributes to the question of: what characterises and informs focal actor's (dis)engagement responses in OI? Addressing the limited attention at individual-level in OI literature, the aim of this thesis is to explore how focal actors activate and bring into being their cognitive processes that characterise the employment of personal agency and (dis)engagement in OI. The papers composing this thesis include synthesising and extending of interdisciplinary theories to understand focal actors' KSS responses in OI. For instance, paper 1 draws on the cognitive dissonance theory and develops theory-guided propositions to explore cognitive perspective of (dis)engagement in OI. Alerting to the antecedents of cognitive inflection point (CIP) (the point at which dissonance is highest) it is proposed that the extent of (dis)engagement response depends on focal actors' ability to self-regulate cognitive conflict, with unresolved MCD proposed to heighten detrimental responses. Building on this personal agency perspective, paper 2 provides a theoretical frame of focal actors' (dis)engagement in OI. A frame of four possible (dis)engagement responses in OI is synthesised. Personal agency is theorised to act as a conduit between focal actors' preferred self and (dis)engagement responses in OI. In paper 3 focal actors' metacognition of agency is explored in 21 cognitive interviews and analysed through theoretical thematic methods. It was detected that focal actors selectively employed metacognitive abilities, pertinent to perceived cognitive problem. Incongruity between personal agency and in-role task demands activated metacognition, which in turn informed cognitive resourcing (construal and attention), in reference to self-concept. Metacognitive experience of engaging in KSS activities took form of mood, feeling of familiarity and feeling of difficulty. Accordingly, in paper 4, mood-as-input and mood congruency were investigated through two behavioural experiments with focal actors. It was found that people in different mood conditions differ in their evaluation of the same idea developed by others, and that this difference is explained by differences in assessment of creativity of the idea and not perceived certainty of its success. Finally paper 5 draws on insights from cognitive interviews to develop a three-phase, six-steps actionable managerial cognition evaluation framework. Using this framework, organisations can identify perceptions, knowledge and abilities of focal actors' tasked to being OI to fruition, avoid traps and better manage external KSS opportunities to attain desired responses towards (dis)engagement in OI. The main theoretical contributions of this thesis include: 1) an interdisciplinary perspective to sources and enabler of (dis)engagement responses in OI; 2) an overarching typology of different forms of (dis)engagement, intended to be used to understand extent and characteristics of individual's KSS responses in OI; 3) empirical understanding of focal actors' agentic meta-level socio-cognitive processes and their connections to subpersonal processes; 4) an original empirically developed metacognitive model of (dis)engagement in OI; 5) introduction and demonstration of cognitive interviewing and behavioural experiment methods to explore cognition and behaviours in OI tasks; and 6) new insights and propositions on managerial cognitive dissonance and focal actors' metacognitive processes to guide OI theory and practice. The main practical contributions of this thesis include: 1) understanding of what affects focal actors' cognitive processes in external KSS; 2) generative mechanisms that can help managers and organisations manage desired (dis)engagement goals; 3) common OI traps related to managerial cognition towards KSS and; 4) a framework to avoid traps with six actionable steps and questions to consider.