The antecedents of new R&D collaborations with different partner types: On the dynamics of past R&D collaboration and innovative performance

Abstract

We examine firms' propensity to adapt their R&D collaboration portfolio by establishing new types of R&D collaboration with different kinds of partners (suppliers, customers, competitors and universities & public research institutions). We argue that existing R&D collaboration with one of the two value chain partners (suppliers or customers) is associated with the formation of new R&D collaboration with the other value chain partner to ensure temporal alignment in innovation within the value chain. In contrast, issues related to governance and unintended knowledge spillovers suggest that 'horizontal' R&D collaboration with competitors only spurs R&D collaboration with other partner types if such competitor R&D collaboration has been discontinued earlier ('delayed temporal alignment').We posit that persistent prior R&D collaboration with institutional partners is an antecedent to the establishment of new R&D collaboration with industrial partners, and that discontinuation of a particular type of R&D collaboration is likely to lead to a restart of such R&D collaborative effort. Strong prior innovative performance is expected to increase the probability that firms establish R&D collaborations with new partner types, except for R&D collaboration with competitors, since the most innovative firms may fear leakage of proprietary knowledge to rivals. We find broad support for these predictions in a large panel of Spanish innovating firms (2004Spanish innovating firms ( -2011. Our findings highlight that it is not just the configuration of R&D collaborations with existing partner types that predicts tie formation with new partner types, but also the intertemporal pattern of prior R&D collaboration and managerial discretion provided by past innovation success.

Cooperation Networks as a Driver of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation

“…These findings support previous work on the importance of R&D intensity and the skills and education of employees tasked with innovation [78,86,87,89]. Since the implementation of open innovation for sustainability requires specific organizational capacities and knowledge integration methods [46,61,78,90].…”

“…It is confirmed that research-intensive companies with FDI are exporters, which avoids their research efforts benefiting the local economy rather than the global markets. Evidence of this is that the national cooperation network is not significant, but exports are [78,86,95].…”

“…In Appendix D, the Cronbach's alpha demonstrates the reliability of the scale. The factor analysis is valid because the amount of explained variance exceeded 50%, the weighting factors of all the items in each scale exceeded 0.5, and the reliability when presenting a Cronbach's alpha greater than 0.7 [78,[86][87][88][89].…”

“…Fourthly, we controlled for export activity, as this can enable a company to better understand foreign cultures and related commercial practices, familiarize itself with possible foreign partners, and come in contact with foreign technological knowledge which can improve innovation performance. This process can imply establishing R&D collaborations with foreign companies to have broader access to locally integrated knowledge [78,86]. Other analyses have focused on how exports influence the propensity to carry out sustainable innovation [33].…”

COOPERATIVE AND NON-COOPERATIVE R&D IN PRODUCT INNOVATION AND FIRM PERFORMANCE

“…Cooperation in innovation has been identified as a valuable R&D strategy to complement the internal R&D efforts of firms (cf., e.g., Hofman, Faems, & Schleimer, 2017;Belderbos, Gilsing, Lokshin, Carree, & Sastre, 2018). Enterprises can cooperate with competitors in jointly exploiting existing products or technologies, to benefit from incremental innovations (Hofman et al, 2017).…”