Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Economics - Innovation economics, grade: 1,3, , course: Innovation Management, language: English, abstract: External knowledge sources are nowadays commonly accepted to be an important element to a firm's innovative performance. Therefore, this research helps to get new insights into the level of a firm's openness behavior referring to its search strategy and innovation performance. Beyond that, I try to find evidence for employee loyalty between high performing and other firms. In detail, the subject here is to explore open innovation by analyzing what dimensions of firm's external search channels are affecting innovation outcomes and whether higher innovation performance could be related to employee loyalty and satisfaction in the R&D department of the German automotive industry. In this study three dimensions of external search strategies that affect firm's innovation performance are investigated. The two concepts of external search breadth and depth that both look into the subject of "how" firm's access external knowledge are introduced. The third concept shows the relevance of choosing the right partners for the innovation process out of a wide range of external sources emphasizing "with whom to interact with" (Arruda et al., 2013). Quantitative research within a mail survey was used for data collection purposes. Based on the survey, I found that searching intense and deeply pre...