Openness and sustainability in competitive research grants: project-level evidence from the EU FP7

Research grants promoted by the European Union (EU) aims at fostering innovation and excellence science. Cooperation is recognized as a crucial means to achieve impactful innovation, as well as to disseminate knowledge to various actors of the society. As sustainability becomes the priority of the EU agenda, it is crucial to understand the factors underlying the success of research projects in environmental-related fields. This paper builds on the green open innovation literature, and by taking a project-level approach, it aims at understanding how open innovation is connected to impactful projects, and whether environmental related goals positively moderate the relation between openness and project impact measured as received funds and publications. This paper employs a dataset of 7,055 research projects under the Cooperation programme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) in 2007-2013 funded by the EU. The results show that higher openness in terms of breadth is positively related to the funds received by the project, but it does not influence scientific output. Green projects (i.e. projects in energy, environmental, transportation and agriculture domains) are smaller on average; however, for green projects the relation between breadth and funds is steeper, suggesting that openness and environmental sustainability are strongly intertwined in more ambitious, complex and high-level projects. These results contribute to the literature on green open innovation at the project-level by providing novel evidence of how openness and environmental goals can increase knowledge creation and impact on the society. To practitioners, this paper suggests the necessity to tackle environmental challenges with a wider network of stakeholders.