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

Abstract

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.

Partner Type Diversity in Alliance Portfolios: Multiple Dimensions, Boundary Conditions and Firm Innovation Performance

“…We find support for curve-linear relationships, which suggests that at some point, the costs involved with accessing external knowledge through increasing partner type variety and integrating knowledge through partner type relevance prevail over the benefits. These results support prior work that suggests that alliance portfolios do not only entail value-enhancing but also costincreasing effects (Faems et al, 2010;Goerzen and Beamish, 2005;Hottenrott and Lopes-Bento, 2016;Jiang et al, 2010;Sampson, 2007).…”

Network Analysis of Open Innovation

“…The effect of OI in any industry in active OI is negative. [17,30,31,[37][38][39][40][41][42] Benefits of OI Internal technology, which is not used is externalized External technology, which is useful and exists outside internalized New revenues from spin-off, license, sale/divestiture Cost and time savings from leveraging external development [22,[43][44][45] Cost of OI Transaction cost The cost, which needs to arrive at cooperation [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52] Thus, if OI increases in high OI industry such as industry belonging to H03, 04 patents, which are a combination of IT and system technology, a kind of open innovation between IT and other industry. Thus, we build H 1-1 and 1-2.…”

The role of intellectual property rights under the concept of open innovation

“…Spotkać można także prace (np. Laursen, Salter, 2006;Hottenrott, Lopes-Bento, 2016), których autorzy wskazują, że relacja ta ma bardziej złożony charakter, a najpełniej obrazuje ją krzywa w kształcie odwróconej litery U.…”