@ARTICLE{10.21494/ISTE.OP.2026.1511, 

TITLE={Inbound, Outbound and Coupled Open Innovation and Innovation Performance: Evidence from Renault’s Business Ecosystem in Tangier, Morocco}, 
  
AUTHOR={Oumaima ElBouzidi
, Si Mohamed Ben Massou, }, 
	
JOURNAL={Science, Technology, Development}, 
	
VOLUME={6}, 

NUMBER={Issue 1}, 
	
YEAR={2026}, 

URL={https://www.openscience.fr/Inbound-Outbound-and-Coupled-Open-Innovation-and-Innovation-Performance}, 
	
DOI={10.21494/ISTE.OP.2026.1511}, 
	
ISSN={2752-6879}, 
	
ABSTRACT={After a long era of closed innovation, firms have opened their innovation processes to external ideas and organized themselves into business ecosystems, in which diverse actors develop their capabilities and simultaneously cooperate and compete around a shared goal: innovation. Prior research links open innovation practices to innovation performance, as collaboration with diverse partners brings additional ideas, knowledge, skills and technologies. Yet this relationship remains scarcely examined in the automotive business ecosystems of emerging economies. As Morocco has become North Africa’s leading automotive producer, eight business ecosystems have emerged in the country, the leading one being that of Renault, which has reshaped Morocco’s industrial landscape and unlocked new potential for its automotive industry. This paper analyzes how inbound, outbound and coupled open innovation affect the innovation performance of firms operating within Renault’s business ecosystem in Morocco. A quantitative approach was adopted: a seven-point Likert-scale questionnaire was administered from 1 June 2023 to 31 January 2024 to ecosystem actors, including employees, suppliers, automotive manufacturers, competitors, customers and the Training Institutes for Automotive Industry Professions. The 196 usable responses were analyzed through principal component analysis, reliability tests and multiple regression. The three dimensions of open innovation each have a significant positive effect on innovation performance, jointly explaining 54.9% of its variance. Inbound open innovation has the strongest effect, followed by outbound and coupled open innovation. Thus, although the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance makes coupled practices central to the ecosystem, absorbing external knowledge remains the main driver of innovation performance in business ecosystems specialized in automotive manufacturing. These findings help ecosystem managers and policymakers prioritize the knowledge flows that most strengthen local innovation capabilities.}}