Complementarity in R&D Cooperation Strategies

Innovation Outcomes and Partner-Type Selection in R&D Alliances: The Role of Simultaneous Diversification and Sequential Adaptation

“…While some previous studies, such as Belderbos et al (2006), take the complementary composition of R&D collaboration into account, they do not relate these patterns to different degrees of innovation novelty. Although other studies account for different degrees of innovation novelty created by knowledge sourcing strategies (Laursen & Salter, 2006), they ignore the structural composition of complementary partnerships within R&D alliances.…”

“…In our next step, we take the firm size into account to analyze the sensitivity of our results to these characteristics. While these studies refer to simultaneous structures of knowledge exchange Belderbos et al, 2006), there are several reasons why we argue that the firm size also affects the role of the sequential adaptation of knowledge structures for specific innovation outcomes.…”

“…These interorganizational structures of knowledge transfers with different types of partners increase the complementarities of existing knowledge within the firm and can constitute an essential source of competitive advantage and dynamic capabilities (Teece et al, 1997). Empirical studies confirm the positive effects of these complementarities between different types of partners on the innovation performance (Belderbos, Carree, & Lokshin, 2006). However, very little is known about the complementarities and congruencies between different external partners and how to match them according to different innovation objectives, such as radical or incremental innovation outcomes.…”

“…Several scholars have noted that the relationship between inter-organizational structures of knowledge exchange and innovation depends on the firm size (Arora et al, 2014;Belderbos et al, 2006). The literature also notes that the firm's size may be linked to features such as its absorptive capacity or previous alliance experience (Sampson, 2005).…”

The Antecedents and Innovation Consequences of Organizational Search: Empirical Evidence for Spain

“…Without losing generality, we normalized the coefficient type 1  to zero as in other empirical studies on complementarities (e.g., Leiponen, 2005;Belderbos, et al, 2006 defining the restriction that underpins supermodularity. This shows that a single implementation in one search type, both internally and externally, allows firms to yield additional returns in terms of innovative performance.…”