 Complementarities in the search for innovation—Managing markets and relationshipsChristoph Grimpe and Wolfgang Sofka Research Policy, 2016, vol. 45, issue 10, 2036-2053 Abstract: Extant research has characterized a firm’s search for external knowledge in its innovation activities as either relational or transactional in nature. The former implies that a firm chooses and develops collaborative relationships with knowledge sources like universities, customers or suppliers, while the latter suggests transactions governed by markets for technology. We argue that prior literature has ignored that both search strategies are interrelated and complementary: adopting one strategy has a higher marginal return on innovation performance if the other one is present. Moreover, we suggest the benefits from complementarity to be higher when a firm is more distant to the technological frontier in the industry and when markets for technology in that industry are shallow. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 3921 German firms from 2001 to 2009 and find support for our hypotheses. Keywords: Search strategies; Collaboration; Markets for technology; Innovation performance (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:45:y:2016:i:10:p:2036-2053 DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2016.07.007 Access Statistics for this article Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier |
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