The knowledge leveraging conundrum of open innovation

Effective research and convergence of internal and external knowledge are becoming increasingly essential to creativity and business results. Companies enter into various open innovation partnerships to achieve this goal with the aim of creating and extracting value in a multi-stakeholder context. The concept of "paradox within a paradox" is explored with the knowledge mining paradox being discovered in the open paradox. We integrate a knowledge-based approach with paradox theory to develop a mathematical model that detects significant knowledge transfer and contact conflicts. We then show how innovation-related information uncertainty adjusts these pressures in the other direction. This uncertainty exacerbates transferability tensions by making knowledge transfer and integration across organisational orders more difficult while reducing exposure tensions for the same reasons. We explore potential approaches for resolving these major information related issues by developing differentiation and consolidation procedures that may enable simultaneous knowledge exchange while minimizing disclosure risks.