Contextual Effects on the Complementarities Between R&D Activities: An Empirical Analysis of the Korean Manufacturing Industry

Sungki Lee, Donghyuk Choi and Yeonbae Kim ()
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Yeonbae Kim: Technology Management, Economics, and Policy Program (TEMEP); Seoul National University

No 200917, TEMEP Discussion Papers from Seoul National University; Technology Management, Economics, and Policy Program (TEMEP)

Abstract: Firms undertake various R&D activities to generate commercializable innovations and to create and sustain competitive advantage. However, mere exploitation of various R&D opportunities has no conclusive impacts on a firm's competitive advantage in innovation, since R&D activities might closely interact with each other and their appropriate combination would have a synergy effect on a firm's innovation performance. The aim of this paper is to explore various contextual factors behind synergy effects derived from interactions between R&D activities based on the economic and technological sources of the R&D complementarities, such as absorptive capacity, knowledge flows, and uncertainty, as well as to examine the existence of complementarities between corporate R&D activities, using the 2004 innovation survey data of Korean manufacturing industries. The corporate R&D activities considered in this study are in-house R&D, R&D cooperation, and commissioned R&D. Our research concludes that there exists a complementary relationship between a firm,s internal R&D and R&D cooperation activity. In addition, our study discovered that the complementarity between R&D activities relies on the organizational contextualities, a firm's cumulative patent stocks, perceived level of imitation risk, experience of external knowledge acquisition, and information inflows from public research institutes and universities?that lie hidden under the firm-specific activities.

Keywords: Contextuality; complementarity; innovation; in-house R&D; R&D cooperation; commissioned R&D. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2009-09, Revised 2009-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-ppm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
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Published in Journal of Management & Organization of eContent Management Pty Ltd, 2012. (later version of this paper)

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