مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

As organizations increasingly engage in joint innovation projects (Eriksson et al., 2016), many studies conclude that cooperative firms have, on average, higher overall performance levels than non-cooperative firms (Abramovsky and Simpson, 2011) since they are able to share investment costs and may take advantage of partners’ resources and capabilities. However, another strand of literature emphasizes that an important issue in project-based environments is the low performance in innovation (Winch, 1998). Others found that firms based on projects do not provide a context supportive of innovation, since they prioritize efficient management of projects (Keegan and Turner, 2002). More recently, Lhuillery and Pfister (2008) find that 14% of R&D collaborating firms had to abandon or delay their innovation projects due to difficulties in their partnerships by the second French Community Innovation Survey. Thus the concern in this paper is to explore the factors influence the performance of cooperation with other organizations in technological innovation projects.

Based on Bosch-Sijtsema and Postma (2008) and Sandin et al. (2014), cooperative innovation projects (CIPs), or interorganizational innovation projects, are specific projects designed to create a new idea, product, material, system, or manufacturing processes in cooperation with other firms (suppliers, customers, competitors and other firms) and public research organizations (such as, R&D institutes and universities). In a broad sense, the performance of cooperative innovation projects (PCIPs) is one of the topics of project governance. Although there is an everincreasing discussion on governance in recent project research, the governance of inter-organizational innovation projects remains ambiguous. Few studies investigate innovation projects performed in cooperation with other firms in project-based industries (Gann and Salter, 2000). Transaction cost economics literature and corporate governance literature are two streams of literature prevalent in general governance literature (Ahola et al., 2014). From the perspective of transaction costs economics, this paper aims to study how firms involved in CIP partnerships protect specific asset investments through governance mechanisms (GMs), which include formal contracts (FCs) and relational trust (RT), and how these GMs deal with the opportunistic behaviors (OBs) and cooperative behaviors (CBs) to arrive at a satisfied PCIP.

At a time when organizational networks and collaborative innovation processes are proliferating in many economies (Calamel et al., 2012), a particular institutional environment may encourage or impede the building of relational ties between trading partners (North, 1990). On the one hand, China has functioned as a highly relational network of clans; on the other hand, China is rapidly changing towards a free market operation, providing a context appropriate for testing the impact of RT and FCs on transactions. Smyth and Morris (2007) argue that projects are context-specific and located in open-systems, this paper will test the effects of the specific investments (SIs) and two governance mechanisms to the performance of cooperative innovation projects within the Chinese context.