Quantity or quality? Knowledge alliances and their effects on patenting

Hottenrott, Hanna; Lopes-Bento, Cindy

doi:10.1093/icc/dtu019

Cited by 24 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Studying the technological relevance of the 1 patented inventions, Vanhaverbeke, Beerkensand, and Duysters (2007) find a positive relationship between technology alliances and patent citations. Finally, Hottenrott and Lopes-Bento (2015) argue that the type of alliance may affect the ability and the incentives to patent, i.e., patent quality and quantity, differently.…”

Section: Gains From Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be too Much of a Good Thing?

Hottenrott

Lopes-Bento

2016

J of Product Innov Manag

Self Cite

133

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R&D collaboration facilitates the pooling of complementary skills, learning from the partner as well as the sharing of risks and costs. Research therefore stresses the positive relationship between collaborative R&D and innovation performance. Fewer studies address the potential drawbacks of collaborative R&D. Collaborative R&D comes at the cost of coordination and monitoring, requires knowledge disclosure, and involves the risk of opportunistic behavior by the partners. Thus, while for lower collaboration intensities the net gains can be high, costs may start to outweigh benefits if firms perform a higher share of their innovation projects collaboratively. For a sample of 2735 firms located in Germany and active in a broad range of manufacturing and service sectors, this study finds that increasing the share of collaborative R&D projects in total R&D projects is associated with a higher probability of product innovation and with a higher market success of new products. While this confirms previous findings on the gains for innovation performance, the results also show that collaboration has decreasing and even negative returns on product innovation if its intensity increases above a certain threshold. Thus, the relationship between collaboration intensity and innovation follows an inverted‐U shape and, on average, costs start to outweigh benefits if a firm pursues more than about two‐thirds of its R&D projects in collaboration. This result is robust to conditioning market success to the introduction of new products and to accounting for the selection into collaborating. This threshold is, however, contingent on firm characteristics. Smaller and younger as well as resource‐constrained firms benefit from relatively higher collaboration intensities. For firms with higher collaboration complexities in terms of different partners and different stages of the R&D process at which collaboration takes place, returns start to decrease already at lower collaboration intensities.

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Section: Gains From Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be too Much of a Good Thing?

Hottenrott

Lopes-Bento

2016

J of Product Innov Manag

Self Cite

133

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“…Similarly, Van Ophem et al (2001) find that firms participating in research partnerships file more patents than firms focusing on internal R&D. Branstetter and Sakakibara (2002) find similar results for firms in government-sponsored research consortia in Japan. Czarnitzki and Fier (2003) and Czarnitzki et al (2007) show that collaborating firms in Germany are more likely to patent than non-collaborating firms and Hottenrott and Lopes-Bento (2014b) argue that the type of alliance may affect the ability and the incentives to patent, i.e., patent quality and quantity, differently.…”

Section: Gains From Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At least part of the knowledge has to be revealed to the consortium partners. Collaborating firms may transmit not only codified but also tacit knowledge to the partner so that leakage risks go beyond the joint project (Hottenrott and Lopes-Bento 2014b). Indeed, partnerships bear the inherent risk of freeriding, where one associate tries to absorb the maximum knowledge from the other while concealing its own efforts (see e.g., Shapiro and Willig 1990;Baumol 1993;Kesteloot and Veugelers 1995).…”

Section: Pains From Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be Too Much of a Good Thing?

Hottenrott

Lopes-Bento

2014

SSRN Journal

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R&D collaboration facilitates the pooling of complementary skills, learning from the partner as well as the sharing of risks and costs. Research therefore repeatedly stresses the positive relationship between collaborative R&D and innovation performance. Fewer studies address the potential drawbacks of collaborative R&D. Collaborative R&D comes at the cost of coordination and monitoring, requires knowledge disclosure and involves the risk of opportunistic behavior by the partners. Thus, while for lower collaboration intensities the net gains can be high, costs may start to outweigh benefits if firms perform a higher share of their innovation projects collaboratively. For a sample of 2,735 firms located in Germany and active in a broad range of manufacturing and service sectors, this study finds that increasing the share of collaborative R&D projects in total R&D projects is associated with a higher probability of product innovation and with a higher market success of new products. While this confirms previous findings on the gains for innovation performance, we also observe that collaboration has decreasing and even negative returns on product innovation if its intensity increases above a certain threshold. Thus, the relationship between collaboration intensity and innovation follows an inverted-U shape and, on average, costs start to outweigh benefits if a firm pursues more than about two-thirds of its R&D projects in collaboration. This result is robust to conditioning market success to the introduction of new products and to accounting for the selection into collaborating. This threshold is, however, contingent on firm characteristics. Smaller and younger as well as resource constrained firms benefit from relatively higher collaboration intensities. For firms with higher collaboration complexities in terms of different partners and different stages of the R&D process at which collaboration takes place, returns start to decrease already at lower collaboration intensities.

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“…Each # Symbol in our paper means the number of variable (e.g., (9) in Table 3 is the number of patents). The table shows that an average co-invention network has about 2600 inventors, and they file a similar number of patents.…”

Section: Descriptive Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, numerous previous studies found that R and D alliances are used as an instrument by firms to acquire new skills and to source specialized know-how (see [9] for a nice review). However, these studies were interested in the effects of collaborative R and D on subsequent innovation performance, without putting emphasis on micro-level interactions of how individual inventors collaborate and which co-working structures are more productive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Network Patterns of Inventor Collaboration and Their Effects on Innovation Outputs

Hur

Park

2016

Sustainability

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Abstract:The purpose of this study is to examine how the collaboration structure among inventors in an R and D organization affects its capability to create impactful innovations. Specifically, this study is focused on examining whether a certain type of network mechanism found in collaboration among inventors contributes more to enhancing the future impacts of collaboration outputs, which is represented by the forward citations of their patents. To this end, co-invention networks for R and D organizations are constructed from an inventor-patent database, and the three structural patterns are measured by using network analytic constructs, namely, structural holes, strength of ties, and centralization. The results show that the presence of structural holes and strong ties are positively associated with the increasing forward citations, and that decentralized collaboration has also a positive impact. The findings offer support for both structural hole and network closure perspectives on social capital, which have been considered contradictive in the literature.

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Quantity or quality? Knowledge alliances and their effects on patenting

Cited by 24 publications

References 71 publications

R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be too Much of a Good Thing?

R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be too Much of a Good Thing?

R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be Too Much of a Good Thing?

Network Patterns of Inventor Collaboration and Their Effects on Innovation Outputs

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