In the era of knowledge economy, open innovation has gradually become an important way for enterprises to obtain the key resources needed by technology innovation. Industry-university-research cooperation is one of the important forms of open innovation. It is also important for enterprises to seek external technical resources to break through their own resources and capacity constrains so as to achieve innovation performance. The heterogeneity of organization and the complementarity of knowledge are the motivation and foundation for enterprises to cooperate with universities and research institutions. Exploring the relationship between openness heterogeneity and innovation performance for industry-university-research cooperation can not only enrich the open innovative theory, but also play an important role in the selection of enterprise partners and the establishment of rational enterprise R&D cooperation strategy. 
   Cooperation openness is an indictor to describe the degree of cooperation between enterprises and external organizations, including the breadth and depth of cooperation. The breadth of cooperation refers to the extent to which an enterprise establishes cooperative relations with other organizations. The more extensive the enterprise cooperation is, the more beneficial it is to widen the breadth of the knowledge base, to increase the type of knowledge source, and to promote the innovation performance. The depth of cooperation refers to the average number of cooperation between enterprises and partners. It means that enterprises absorb the depth of external information and knowledge from external sources of knowledge. Industry-University-Research institution through deep-level cooperation can strengthen the degree of trust, establish lasting trust relationship, weaken knowledge transfer risk and cost, reduce information asymmetry and improve innovation ability. 
    Scholars pay less attention to the research on the effect of openness heterogeneity for inter-organizational cooperation on innovation performance. To make up for the lack of existing research, the Industry-University-Research institution (I-U-R) cooperation networks have been created with three-year windows, based on co-applied patents data from the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) in the Chinese Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry during 1999-2015. With a longitudinal sample of 14, 596 Chinese firms we analyze the impact of heterogeneous openness of universities and research institutions on firm innovation performance using the negative binomial regression method. 
    The results show that the regression coefficients of enterprise-enterprise and enterprise-university cooperation breadth were significantly positive at the significant level of 5%. It means that the cooperation breadth of enterprise-enterprise and enterprise-university has a positive impact on innovation performance of the enterprise. The regression coefficients of cooperation breadth for enterprises-research institutions were significantly negative at the significant level of 1%. It means that the cooperation breadth of enterprises-research institutions has a negative impact on innovation performance of the enterprise. In terms of cooperation depth, the regression coefficients of for enterprise-enterprise cooperation has not passed the significant test. This show that the cooperation depth of enterprises enterprise has no significant impact on innovation performance of the enterprises. The regression coefficients of enterprise-university cooperation depth were significantly positive at the significant level of 1%.  It means that the cooperation depth of enterprise-university has a positive impact on innovation performance of the enterprise. The regression coefficients of for enterprise-research institutions cooperation has not passed the significant test. This shows that the cooperation depth of enterprises-research institutions has no significant impact on innovation performance of the enterprises. In general, whether the cooperation between enterprises and universities is extensive or deep level, all has significant impact on innovation performance of the enterprises. So, the universities play an important role in improving the innovative performance of ICT enterprises in China. But the research institutions promoting effect on innovation performance of ICT enterprises need to be further improved. 
    Industry-university-research cooperation has always been the core problem of the phenomenon of "two skins" between science and technology and economy in China. The key to industry-university-research cooperation is to strengthen and highlight the enterprise main position in technology innovation, to speed up the establishment of enterprises as the main market-oriented, in-depth integration of innovative-technology system. Therefore, the industry-university-research cooperation should pay attention to the depth of integration. The conclusions of the study provide a theoretical basis for the design of the mode of in-depth integration of industry-university-research in China. At the same time, it will also help to further improve the theory of open innovation. Policy suggestions are as follows.
    First, strength the depth of integration between enterprises and research institutions to build research and development platform. Generally speaking, the R&D personnel in the enterprises and the experts in research organization have different goals. The former emphasizes the applicability of technology, while the latter emphasizes the advancement of technology. By enterprises and research institutions to build laboratories, engineering research centers or other R&D platforms is to promote the in-depth exchange and integration of talent, technology and information. The two sides jointly carry out scientific and technological transformation of enterprises, production development and tackling key scientific and technological problems, so as to directly promote the transformation and application of scientific and technological achievements.
    Second, it should carry out the major project of combining industry-university-research in science and technology, build a public service platform for the transformation and incubation of S&T achievements and the innovative alliance, improve the system and mechanism of innovation, vigorously promote the synergy innovation between industry-university-research, and continue to expand the depth and breadth of cooperation between the main innovation bodies. Encourage more and more university and research institutions to break the traditional focus on academic research or closed R&D ideas, based on the needs of enterprises to carry out targeted innovation and services. Encourage more and more university and research institutions to play an important role in some core technologies and modules of the R&D process.
   Due to the availability of data, the paper uses joint patent application as a measure of industry-university-research cooperation has some limitations. In the future research other indicators of industry-university-research cooperation should be expanded.