Abstract
Collaboration in innovation is considered an effective strategy to overcome barriers to innovate in SMEs. However, resource constraints and risk of knowledge leakage force management in SMEs to be selective with whom and where to collaborate. Still little is known about interactions between types of partners and their geographical location. This paper sheds new light on the relation between functional and geographical diversity in innovation partners and new-to-the-market and new-to-the-firm innovation performance in SMEs. Using data from two waves (2008 and 2010) of the Community Innovation Survey for Belgium, a positive relation is found between market partners and innovation new-to-the-firm, and between science and global partners and innovation new-to-the-market. A larger diversity in type and in geographical spread of partners is found to be positively associated with innovation new-to-the-market. Cooperation with a diverse set of market partners enhances new-to-the-firm innovation. More diversity in science partners enhances the balance between new-to-the-firm and new-to-the-market innovation. Diversity among international partners enhances new-to-the-firm and new-to-the-market innovation, but not the balance between both. A cooperation strategy balancing functional with geographical partner diversity enhances the balance between new-to-the-firm versus new-to-the-market innovation.
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Notes
This argument does not ignore that sometimes universities and public research institutes are increasingly involved in short term solution finding.
Patent information is not available within the CIS 2008 and 2010, so we could not verify this possible explanation.
For instance, market diversity has j = 2 categories. So, the diversity index yields values from 0 till 0.5. In rescaling, all values are divided by 0.5, which is the upper bound in the interval. Similarly, science-diversity with j = 3 categories was divided by 0.6 (i.e. 2/3).
For instance, functional diversity has j = 6 partners; and aggregating the YES responses of all the initial binary input will yield a maximum total of 5 per partner. This is because of 5 locations identified in the CIS. Thus, the geographical dimension is indirectly in the computation of functional partners—as we argued for separating them in the regression output.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Liza Archanskaia for the valuable comments and suggestions for improving this paper. We also thank Barry Bozeman and two reviewers for their highly-appreciated review feedback. The work undertaken for this paper benefitted from financial support from the Brussels Capital Region—Innoviris. BHG/PRFB-Anticipate 2014-73: Brussels knowledge flows: localized learning and regional knowledge pipelines.
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Sarpong, O., Teirlinck, P. The influence of functional and geographical diversity in collaboration on product innovation performance in SMEs. J Technol Transf 43, 1667–1695 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-017-9582-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-017-9582-z
Keywords
- Collaboration
- Functional diversity
- Geographical diversity
- New-to-the-market innovation
- New-to-the-firm innovation
- SMEs