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Top1. Introduction
Today’s business environment is increasingly competitive, such that SMEs that often lack resources and technologies have difficulties coping in this system where the biggest challenge is to survive and grow (Centobelli and Esposito 2018). To face this environment, Congolese SMEs are exploiting and implementing various strategies to achieve market-leading business performance. Knowledge is becoming fundamental to any firm's success and competitive advantage (Shah and Cross 2018). SMEs in developing countries are struggling to maintain close contact with external knowledge sources (Salamzadeh and Radovic-Markovic, 2016). The diversity and competition of these external knowledge sources possessed by a firm are considered as indicators of innovation performance (Chiang and Hung 2010). In this perspective, as an intangible asset, knowledge is often seen as an essential source of innovation (Bhatt 2001). Bhandar (2007) demonstrated that knowledge is critical for High-Tech SMEs to establish a sustainable innovation advantage. Thus, Chesbrough (2003) argued that innovation is far from being a result of an isolated firm effort or an exclusive use of internal resources but a result of various collective resources.
Thus, Chesbrough (2003) introduced the concept of open innovation by describing the inflows and outflows of knowledge that ensure an acceleration of internal innovation developed, commercialized by a firm, and innovation developed, commercialized by other firms. In this context, other researchers analyzed the characteristics of these “new models” of innovation management by exploring the capabilities and practices deployed, not only in intensive-knowledge industries but also in more traditional industries. Theoretically, models resulting from these studies include the Open Innovation (OI) paradigm popularized by (Chesbrough and West 2006); the theory of user-driven innovation introduced by (von Hippel 1986); approaches to innovation as a community introduced by (Amin and Cohendet 2004); or the ecosystem approach and business models initiated by (Moore 2006). All of these approaches view innovation as the result of interactions and collaboration between diverse institutions. That involves finding, selecting, combining, and integrating various tangible and intangible resources in different organizational and technological contexts, distributed within and across firm boundaries. Accordingly, research has demonstrated the effectiveness of OI in stimulating innovation (Chen, and Vanhaverbeke 2011; Mazur 2016; Rangus et al. 2017). Hence, OI has become a critical approach to promote firm innovation (Cassiman and Valentini 2016). However, results are still mixed regarding how OI fosters knowledge integration (Sivam et al. 2019).