When birds of a feather don't flock together: Diversity and innovation outcomes in international R&D collaborations

Federica Brunetta, Lucia Marchegiani and Enzo Peruffo

Journal of Business Research, 2020, vol. 114, issue C, 436-445

Abstract: Collaboration is a key to success. Nonetheless, collaboration dynamics are affected by partner compatibility, which, in turn, is strongly affected by team member diversity. Studies on team diversity have shown significant variation in the magnitude, significance, and causal direction of the correlations. We examine how international R&D teams collaborate, investigating the impact of team diversity on innovation. We focus on institutional diversity to analyze how, together with the duration of the collaboration, it affects innovation outcomes. We argue that institutional diversity hampers effective knowledge sharing and negatively affects innovation outcomes. However, this negative effect is mitigated by the duration of the R&D collaboration. The longer the diverse actors collaborate, the more likely they are to overcome the barriers of institutional diversity and find effective modes of collaboration for knowledge transfer and innovation. We test our hypotheses in the context of 3658 clinical trial projects conducted between 2001 and 2015.

Keywords: International R&D Collaboration; Institutional diversity; Innovation outcomes; Pharmaceutical industry; Diversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014829631930503X
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:jbrese:v:114:y:2020:i:c:p:436-445

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.08.033

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().