Firms increasingly practice open innovation through a collaborative approach. Most studies so far have concentrated on larger firms, leaving aside SMEs while they increasingly use collaborative innovation to overcome their liability of smallness. However, their limited resources impede their capacity to enter or develop networks. Innovation clusters might be privileged space to favour the building of collaborative networks for SMEs and to enhance their knowledge potential and absorptive capacity, facilitating therefore their ability to assimilate external knowledge and create new “collaborative” knowledge. In this paper, we propose to analyse the role of cluster governance as a potential intermediary in dynamising SMEs’ openness through knowledge management practices. Our analysis compares 4 main knowledge brokering practices within three French innovation clusters, and how they foster and sustain open innovation patterns. Our study confirms the importance of cluster governance as a powerful intermediary in enhancing SMEs absorptive capacity and supporting their ability to integrate collaboration networks. We also find that these practices rely on the capacity of the cluster governance to build strong cohesion links between heterogeneous members through differentiated approaches of socialization and/or formalization. This work provides critical lenses for cluster managers to adopt adequate knowledge management practice to foster collaborative innovation dynamics for its members.
