This paper examines interdependencies between firms’ activities in the realms of open science and commercial product development. We present a theoretical framework that outlines when a firm’s involvement in academic communities enhances its innovative performance in terms of new products in development. We argue that the disclosure of more, valuable R&D work in quality scholarly publications and collaborations with academic partners positively affect firm innovation. We further hypothesize a differential effect of adopting open science strategies on the innovation type, being more pronounced for radical innovations than for incremental innovations. We empirically analyze a unique panel dataset containing information on the product innovation performance and R&D activities of 160 UK therapeutic biotechnology firms over the period 1998- 2009. Our results from count data models on the number of new products in development provide empirical support for our hypotheses.
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