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R&D partnerships and innovation performance : can there be too much of a good thing?
Hottenrott, Hanna
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Lopes-Bento, Cindy
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URL:
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https://ub-madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/37427
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URN:
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urn:nbn:de:bsz:180-madoc-374279
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Document Type:
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Working paper
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Year of publication:
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2014
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The title of a journal, publication series:
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ZEW Discussion Papers
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Volume:
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14-108
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Place of publication:
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Mannheim
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Publication language:
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English
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Institution:
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Sonstige Einrichtungen > ZEW - Leibniz-Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung
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MADOC publication series:
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Veröffentlichungen des ZEW (Leibniz-Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung) > ZEW Discussion Papers
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Subject:
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330 Economics
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Classification:
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JEL:
O31 , O32 , O33 , O34,
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Keywords (English):
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Innovation performance , product innovation , R&D partnerships , collaboration intensity , SMEs , transaction costs , selection model , endogenous switching
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Abstract:
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R&D collaboration facilitates pooling of complementary skills, learning from the partner as
well as sharing risks and costs. Research therefore repeatedly stressed the positive relationship
between collaborative R&D and innovation performance. Fewer studies addressed potential
drawbacks of collaborative R&D. Collaborative R&D comes at the costs of coordination and
monitoring, requires knowledge disclosure and involves the risk of opportunistic behaviour by
the partners. Thus, while the net gains from collaboration can be high initially, cost may start
to outweigh those benefits if firms engage in multiple collaborative projects simultaneously.
This study explicitly considers a firm’s collaboration intensity, that is, the share of
collaborative R&D projects in the firms’ total R&D project portfolio. For a sample of 2,891
firms located in Germany, active in abroad range of manufacturing and service sectors and of
which 86% are SMEs, we indeed find 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 we can confirm previous findings in terms of
gains for innovation performance, we also find that collaboration has decreasing and even
negative returns on product innovation if its intensity increases above a certain threshold.
Consequently, the relationship between collaboration intensity and innovation has an
inverted-U shape. In particular, costs start outweighing 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.
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