The role of public external knowledge for firm innovativeness

María García-Vega and Óscar Vicente-Chirivella ()

International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2024, vol. 93, issue C

Abstract: Public research organizations (PROs) and universities receive large amounts of public funding for the generation and transmission of knowledge, and companies contract external knowledge from both. An important question for the management of a firm's R&D and for public innovation policies is: What is more beneficial for the generation of firm innovations, external knowledge created by PROs or by universities? In this paper, we assess the impact of external knowledge from PROs versus universities on firm innovativeness. We use information on R&D acquisitions from a panel dataset of more than 10,000 Spanish firms from 2005 to 2014. We show that external knowledge from PROs and universities increases firm innovativeness. Our results suggest that knowledge generated by PROs is more sensitive to the absorptive capacity of the firm than knowledge generated by universities. This has implications for research policy, R&D management, and organizational strategies of firms’ knowledge activities. Firms with low absorptive capacities benefit relatively more from knowledge generated by universities than from knowledge generated by PROs. Moreover, R&D managers should plan both their external and internal R&D if they acquire external R&D from PROs.

Keywords: Public research organizations; Universities; External knowledge; Firm innovativeness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 L24 L25 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167718724000110
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:indorg:v:93:y:2024:i:c:s0167718724000110

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijindorg.2024.103056

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Industrial Organization is currently edited by P. Bajari, B. Caillaud and N. Gandal

More articles in International Journal of Industrial Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().