Two routes to treble innovation: Focused open innovation or emergent differentiation strategy

Service innovation is gaining traction and combined with more traditional product and process innovation is forming a triad of technological innovations. Firms that possess this triad simultaneously are known as treble innovation firms. Our study aims to analyse the antecedents of treble innovation. We draw on the complementary perspective and emergent strategy theoretical realms to propose two routes towards treble innovation. We argue that both open innovation and differentiation focus will increase the likelihood of becoming treble innovation in a subsequent period, but the effect of open innovation will be stronger for dual innovation firms, whereas the effect of differentiation focus will be stronger for non-innovators. We test our conceptual model using data from repeated Community Innovation Surveys administered to 1,081 Portuguese manufacturing SMEs in 2016 and 2018. We constraint our analysis to firms that were not treble innovators in 2016, so we could infer causal relationships between independent variables measured in 2016 and the probability to adopt treble innovation in 2018. The results advance our understanding on how technological innovation develops in manufacturing industry, including the relative importance of open innovation and differentiation strategies to complete a treble innovation portfolio in the future depending on their current innovation portfolio.