Enhancing Innovation in Technology-Based SMEs: The Role of Open Innovation and Strategic Orientation

Abstract

The capacity to innovate has grown to be a major obstacle in the corporate environment in the digital age. For technology-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), open innovation provides a strategic and cultural means to improve their innovation capacity by using internal and external ideas, resources, and technical knowledge-how. Although earlier studies have examined how open innovation affects big businesses, there is a great knowledge vacuum on how open innovation and strategic orientation affect innovation performance in SMEs, especially in underdeveloped countries. This research fills this need by investigating in Costa Rican technology-based SMEs the link between open innovation, strategic orientation, and inventive performance using a quantitative, cross-sectional methodology. The research supports the suggested hypotheses using Cronbach’s alpha and statistical models, showing that strategic orientation and open innovation favorably affect inventive performance. The results add to the state of the art by giving empirical data from a developing economy setting and pragmatic advice for SMEs trying to improve their capacity for innovation in a fast-changing digital environment.

Received: 14 January 2025 | Revised: 15 April 2025 | Accepted: 4 July 2025

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares that he has no conflict of interest in this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Author Contribution Statement

Gabriel Silva-Atencio: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.