•The experience of abandoning an innovation activity can positively affect an organization's innovation performance.•The effect is contingent upon the way an organization is engaging with open innovation.•Openness has a negative effect on learning from the experience of abandoning an innovation activity.•Engaging with many different types of sources of innovation does not encourage the change of routines needed for learning.•Formal collaborations generate inertial forces which restrict learning from the experience of abandoning innovation activities. Firms are encouraged to continually initiate innovation activities as part of their new product development processes and to be open to the use of external knowledge sources. Yet, many are abandoned. Openness to external knowledge sources and the experience of abandoning innovation activities are, therefore, becoming a part of an organization’s reality and innovation strategy. In this paper, we aim to explore how the experience of having abandoned an innovation activity can affect innovation performance and the role two key dimensions of openness, external search breadth and formal innovation collaboration breadth, play. Using data from the UK Innovation Survey, we find that the experience of having abandoned an innovation activity leads to improved innovation performance and that this is negatively moderated by the two dimensions of openness. When external search breadth is high, i.e. when an organization engages with a higher number of different types of knowledge sources, the link between abandoning innovation activities and innovation performance weakens. Similarly, when formal innovation collaboration breadth is high, i.e. the breadth of a firm’s formal collaboration relationships is high, the link between abandoning innovation activities and innovation performance also weakens. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.