Multi-Firm Collaboration and International Competitive Dynamics (original) (raw)

Cooperation in Innovation

This study presents that the market success of businesses depends on their innovation performance in the current, increasingly intensive, quickly changing and efficiency-oriented competitive environment. Furthermore, apart from corporate technological competences, the management of relationship networks, co-operating partners, co-operation content and intensity strongly determine the innovation effectiveness. The empirical research into Hungarian corporate practices verifies the positive impact of relationship and network competences. However, this research also highlights the weaknesses of these factors and offers development opportunities and actions to businesses and governmental and regional development organisations. The presentation of the mutual advantages and strategic efforts of the university-business collaboration (UBC) and the limited effectiveness of the cooperation practices need significant relationship marketing support in the future, from both sides.

Managing Collaboration In The 21st Century - A Global Perspective

2014

Recent studies underline the rethinking of the innovation model. The traditional approach, based on the creation of new ideas in a centralized Research – Development department and the implementation of results at small scale isn’t at 21st century’s level anymore. This research paper will present the innovation that is brought to market through networks of niche companies, with unique capabilities that opera?te in an organized way. This new model requires from the companies the development of different skills and the ability to collaborate with business partners for the creation of innovational synergy. There are some less-inspired approaches of the issue, like: the approach focused on cutting costs (underestimating the strategic role of worldwide communication/collaboration); the approach of collaboration in an inefficient way(one way relationship) and the suboptimal capitalization of cooperation opportunities (direct translation to globally connected companies). In antithesis, com...

Collaborative resources in innovation and global competition: Profitability implications

2008

We argue in this paper that in expanding global competition, when the knowledge base of products and markets is complex and the sources of performance advantages are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in inter-firm collaboration, rather than in individual firms. By examining the role of firm resources and capabilities in innovation and business relationship management, we put forward a collaboration-innovation-performance model and derive hypotheses that link various findings in the literature on ldquomarket-oriented innovationrdquo. We test these hypotheses on a sample of 5627 firms across different industries both in the manufacturing and service sector in 13 countries. Results support our hypotheses and have implications for practice and future research on firm resources in innovation and inter-firm collaboration.

Cooperation in Innovation Activities: The Importance of Partners

2010

This paper analyses the importance of cooperation partners for the development of innovation activities. We contribute to the literature on cooperation in innovation activities that seeks to identify the characteristics differentiating cooperative from non-cooperative firms by proposing a different approach to this problem. We distinguish firms according to their evaluation of cooperation partners in the development of innovation activities. We apply a probit selection model to account for the firm’s decision to cooperate (or not). The data we use come from the Portuguese Third Community Innovation Survey. Our estimation results show that firms from high-technological industries, with higher levels of absorptive capacity and of innovation investment, who give importance to incoming spillovers management, and who cooperate with firms from the same group or with suppliers, place greater value on cooperation partners in the innovation process. Additionally, we also find that the factors influencing the importance attributed to cooperation activities are different from the ones behind the decision to cooperate.

Collaboration Networks and Innovation: How to Define Network Boundaries

Numerous studies in management, sociology, and economics have documented that the architecture of collaboration networks affects the innovation performance of individuals, firms, and regions. Little is known though about whether the association between collaboration patterns and innovation outcomes depends on the network geographical boundaries chosen by the researcher. This issue is crucial for both policy-makers and firms that rely on innovation. This article compares the association between collaboration networks and future patenting between regional and country-level collaboration networks. If we relate future innovation to the global, country-wide network our statistical analysis reproduces the findings of the previous literature. However, we find systematically less important effects of regional innovation patterns on subsequent patenting of innovators. Hence, managers and policy makers should choose the boundaries of the innovation networks that they look at carefully, aiming for integration into larger-scale collaboration communities.