Exploring SMEs’ open innovation practices diversity from four countries.

As far as we know, this paper constitutes a first approach to a cross-country comparison of open innovation practices in SMEs, a little explored field whose the surge of articles on this topic has increased significantly in recent years. Recent reviews have highlighted the need to consider context dependencies. Hence, this paper takes the fact that criteria of innovation country performance is a relevant factor into consideration. This paper proposes a meta-analysis to accumulate the results of four different studies, thus, to examine open innovation practices of SMEs in different environments. The aim is to highlight on how open innovation practices in SMEs can be in relationship with to the environment. We find that joint some practices could not be adopted at the same time because they are in relationship with opposite context. Other practices show that even if it is important to consider external characteristics to understand fully the open innovation adoption, contextual effect alone is not enough to explain the diversity in adoption of open innovation. By this way, we confirmed that open innovation is not a universal character