Firms participations in international markets is known to stimulate innovations as well as expose them to both international and domestic partners that can influence their innovation prospects and activities. Countries with weaker innovation potentials acquire advanced knowledge, technologies and innovations when they interact and collaborate with partners in the international ecosystem. The focus of this paper is to explore the linkage between firm’s decisions to internationalize and its additionality effects on firm-level innovations. Our results show a positive and significant correlations between these firms’ participation in international markets and their product, process, research and development and acquisition of external knowledge. We also find that, the foreign enterprise group, foreign clients and customers from the private sector as well as foreign consultants were vital for firms’ innovation. In contrast we find that there is no relationship between foreign ownership and firms’ innovations as can be seen from the insignificant coefficients results. The ATE results show that the extent of internationalizations increased the probabilities of stimulating product, process innovations and R&D on average by 21, 14 and 9 percentage points in comparison with firms that didn’t internationalize. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

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This paper seeks to examine the various sources of knowledge and innovation that Slovak and Hungarian manufacturing firms rely on to improve their innovative performance. To carry out our empirical analysis we used the multiple regression technique and data from the Community Innovation Survey conducted between 2010 and 2012. Our empirical analysis demonstrated divergent results for both countries. Slovak firms derived their innovation from in-house activities and other sources such as scientific journals and conferences while Hungarian firms relied on market sources such as cooperation with clients or customers from the private sector for their innovation as well as from scientific journals. However, there was a convergence in the results, manufacturing firms in both countries didn't collaborate with research institutions such as universities and other public and private research organization for their innovation. This study, therefore, proposes firms to foster closer collaboration with these research institutions since they are the birthplaces of innovation that can increase their competitiveness and innovation performance.

There is a growing consensus that knowledge drives firms’ process and product innovations. An important source of these innovations is from firms networking with R&D partners, such as those in the science system and other industries in the enterprise group. This paper aimed to examine firms’ innovation collaborations with science systems and enterprise group partners and how these influence their product and process innovations. We focused on firms in the manufacturing sectors in the Czech Republic and Hungary. For our empirical analysis, we used the truncated data from the Eurostat Community Innovation Survey (CIS) 2012–2014, and the binary logistic regression model. Our results have demonstrated that firms’ collaborations with these actors have a discernible positive influence on their product innovations. Conversely, the collaborations with these R&D partners for process innovations produced mixed results for both countries.

1Multinational companies (MNCs) are geographically widespread production networks that can coordinate operations and activities in more than one country. MNCs transfer innovations, expertise, knowledge and advanced technologies to their host countries through their subsidiaries. Therefore, multinational companies are seen as transfer intermediaries distributing international technologies and innovations. MNCs help to bridge the existing technology gap between developed and developing countries. Due to the multilocation nature of MNCs, the study aims to examine the various drivers that influence Hungarian MNCs' R&D collaborations, making them choose to collaborate either with local partners or with partners in the countries of their headquarters. The paper reports on the preliminary findings of an on-going comparative research focused on understanding the key drivers of innovations and competitiveness in Hungary. For our empirical analysis, drawing on data from the Eurostat's harmonized Community Innovation Survey 2010-2012, we used the probit regression model. Since many studies have shown that innovation processes in companies are based on the same principles or similar framework, it is possible to generalize the results of the analysed data and successfully put the recommendations into practice. Our analysis provided mixed results; it has demonstrated that marketing orientations, expenditures devoted to research and development, absorptive capacity, firm size as well as funding support provided to Hungarian MNCs influenced their choice of collaborating partners. Hungarian MNCs were highly probable to collaborate with both local and foreign partners in the enterprise group, while preferring to cooperate with local universities rather than foreign ones.