AMO-enhancing practices, open innovation and organizations’ innovation in the European context: testing a mediation model

The literature has recognized the key role of the HRM practices for enhancing firms’ innovative performance. At the same time, scholars have consistently demonstrated open innovation to be an effective approach for boosting companies’ innovative outcome. Nevertheless, academics have largely overlooked to investigate the complex relationship between HRM practices, open innovation and organizations’ innovativeness. Using the AMO framework as analytical lens and data drawn from the European Company Survey 2019, a large-scale representative dataset at European level, this study investigates the direct and indirect relationship between the ability, motivation and opportunities-enhancing practices and firms’ innovation capacity, hypothesizing a potential mediating role of open innovation. The results show that companies that motivate workers and give them the opportunity to contribute with their skills, knowledge and abilities not only have higher probability to innovate, but also are more inclined to collaborate with external partners. Moreover, open innovation not only enhance the innovation capacity of the firm, but also partially mediates the relationship between HRM and organizations’ innovativeness. These results shed further lights on both “the human side” of open innovation, as well as in the mechanisms linking HRM practices with innovation.