Countries around the world have made efforts to achieve sustainable economic growth in order to face an increasingly globalized, complex and uncertain business environment. In this context, innovation is considered as one of the main solutions and paths. Brazil, in terms of its capacity for innovation, is far below the great innovative powers in the world. Despite this reality, the agriculture sector has shown considerable growth in its capacity for innovation and the production of frontier knowledge. However, even within this sector, the search for more innovative results has been a constant concern of companies. In this sense, the practice of open innovation as a catalyst for innovation has been shown to be a necessity. Thus, the multiple case study, carried out in three decentralized units, of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation - Embrapa, an important company in the agricultural sector, allowed to analyze and evaluate how the internal resources and the alliances established by these Units, interact and affect their performance innovation, so that they can increase their contributions to Brazil s innovation capacity. The study found that, although the Units practice open innovation, the interaction between their internal and external knowledge sources provides an increase in their innovation capacities and performances, even though such interactions provide only a competitive parity to the Units and innovative performances on average, the results confirm the importance of the interaction between the two internal and external environments.