Relevance of innovation cooperation for firms’ innovation activity: the case of Slovenia

Abstract

The paper analyses the importance of innovation cooperation on the innovation activity of Slovenian firms, and puts it within the broader context of firm's innovation activity determinants. Probit estimations based on firm-level data confirm that, next to R&D spending, innovation cooperation is the most important factor in firms' probability to innovate. This paper is the first to explicitly analyse the effect of variety and different types of innovation cooperation. Within innovation cooperation, a significant and positive effect on innovation activity is confirmed for domestic as well as for international innovation cooperation, for public as well as private cooperation, especially with customers, suppliers and advisors, but not for cooperation with public institutions such as universities and R&D institutes. Innovation cooperation should, thus, be more intensively promoted, especially in countries that lag behind in own R&D spending.

Determinants of Innovation Cooperation Performance: What Do We Know and What Should We Know?

“…Existing research has focused on open innovation practices in developed economies, with limited focus on less developed countries, such as the transition economies, like Central and Eastern Europe countries [49]. We can find some interesting research focused on open innovation, innovation cooperation or innovation performance in the CEE [6,49,60,100,101], but these few studies are unfortunately focused on a particular country. Taking into account the biopharmaceutical industry in the CEE region with high potential of clinical trials could be an interesting research gap for future studies, including both business-university alliances [102,103] [108], as well as antecedents of SME innovativeness in transition or post-transition countries (where companies face more external and institutional obstacles to innovation).…”

“…Riskier and more complex product development processes, globalization of economies and the demand for increasingly innovative services and products have increased the pressure on firms to enhance their innovativeness [1][2][3]. Thus, firms have increasingly sought for external sources of innovation development, such as external collaborations [4][5][6]. The engagement of firms in a wide array of innovation cooperation forms, such as innovation alliances, has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in today's business landscape [7].…”

“…As a consequence, most firms are involved in multiple simultaneous cooperation types in various locations, often geographically dispersed, with various partners and are, therefore, facing the challenge to manage an entire cooperation network [9,10]. Innovation cooperation can be referred to as collaboration with external parties with a key objective of generating innovations, and raging from wholly-owned subsidiaries, through different forms of equity and non-equity alliances, to transactions, where independent firms engage in arms-length transactions [6].…”

Survival of the fittest: an evolutionary approach to an export-led model of growth

“…The idea is studied on the case of Slovenia, a small open economy, pursuing the export led model of growth (Damijan, Kostevc, & Polanec, 2011;Jaklič, Damijan, Rojec, & Kunčič, 2014).…”

Cobb–Douglas production function on FDI in Southeast Europe

“…Contrary, we see that there is fall of number of permanent full-time workers and negative annual employment growth which is mainly because of European debt crisis which hit Slovenia harshly and distorted the factor markets (Jaklič et al 2014;Damijan et al 2013). When investigated the exports, it is shown that there is positive significance in incline of proportion of total sales that are exported directly and it is owned mainly on capital-intensive sectors and foreign ownership, as the negative slope of proportion of total sales that are exported indirectly denotes less inclusion of domestic business in the output equation.…”