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The target of this paper is twofold: investigating open innovation practices that are used up in French manufacturing industries, and evaluating the impact on firms' innovativeness of those networking abilities in comparison to internal development of competences and to spillovers available in the neighborhood. Concretely, thanks to a huge database on competences for innovation, the paper estimates the impact of different categories of innovative competences (mostly relational ones) on innovative performance. This empirical analysis first shows that if networking abilities are the core innovative competences, strategies to tap into external innovation sources vary across sectors. Second, this work allows to precise the relational competences that firms should develop in order to improve their innovative performance.