Knowledge resources, mainly due to their causal ambiguity and inimitability, play a central role in shaping the competitive advantage of organizations. This chapter aims to illustrate a correspondence between knowledge types and organizational types in open innovation (OI) networks. It maps the knowledge types that shape diverse institutions of the economy as presented by the Triple Helix model: episteme at the academia, techne at the industry, and phronesis at the government. Each organization - beyond its institutional knowledge specialization - diversifies to incorporate the other two knowledge types in its knowledge integration portfolio. For example, a university may develop technologies and conduct responsible research and/or a firm may conduct scientific research and engage in corporate social responsibility activities. The implications of these institutional specialization and organizational diversification in OI networks are twofold: (a) organizations can gain a competitive edge by diversifying into a unique portfolio of knowledge integration encompassing a novel proportion of episteme, techne, and phronesis and (b) to achieve the highest level of knowledge integration, organizations belonging to diverse institutions can engage in inter-organizational knowledge sharing to meta-integrate their institutionally specialized and organizationally diversified knowledge types.

Organizations collaborate with external actors in order to acquire knowledge resources they cannot develop internally for economic and/or technical reasons. Mode 2 and Triple Helix models have examined the role of different organizational types in collaborative creation and knowledge use. This paper is an empirical investigation on whether universities differ from business-oriented or industrial organization types with regard to the extent of their knowledge collaborations. Using SEM methodology, it demonstrates the role of universities in knowledge collaboration through a survey of 472 organizations in the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development of the European Commission, Energy theme (FP7-Energy). In line with the Triple Helix model, universities are found to exhibit more extensive knowledge collaboration than businesses. Also, between-university collaborations are found to be more extensive knowledge collaboration relationship types than between-business relationships. The findings imply that (1) publically funded consortia should be aware that universities are more conducive and hence more effective in inter-organizational knowledge collaboration networks than other organizational types, particularly compared to for-profit business organizations. Universities should be included in these consortia. (2) Business organizations that do not have an extensive relationship with universities need to reconsider their partner portfolio and extend the knowledge collaboration of their network by connecting to more universities.(3) Policymakers should not only involve academic organizations but also include groups of more than one university per consortium to enable between-university knowledge collaboration to boost collaborative knowledge exploration and exploitation of the consortia.