The main objective of the study is to investigate how firms can improve their performance. In particular, the impact of the creation of knowledge by firms (closed innovation) or the share of knowledge among firms (open innovation) on the firms’ performance is investigated. Both economic and innovation performance are considered. The economic performance is evaluated using the turnover of firms, whereas the innovation performance is evaluated using not only the number of patents but also other patents features that are relevant in predicting the forward citations that are considered as a proxy of the innovation performance and capability. The results show that firms’ innovation performance increases in the share of knowledge case, whereas the economic performance has a better result in the case of no share of knowledge.