مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

External collaborations and open innovation play an increasingly central role in firm innovation management and performance (e.g. Chesbrough, 2006; Lakemond et al., 2016). Extant literature has mainly explored how external collaboration, acting in tandem with internal knowledge generation efforts, may improve innovation performance (e.g. Alexy et al., 2016; Chesbrough, 2006; Kale and Singh, 2009; Wassmer, 2010; Wuyts and Dutta, 2014; Zidorn and Wagner, 2013). In this line, Lakemond et al. (2016) suggest that knowledge integration through open innovation collaboration can be essentially perceived as a knowledge governance problem. Hence, firms’ decisions on the management of partners and knowledge inflows and outflows will have an impact on their innovation performance. Despite the opportunities that external collaborations offer to acquire or to access complementary and supplementary knowledge, the literature finds mixed evidence on their role in innovation performance (e.g. Abramovsky et al., 2008; Chun and Mun, 2012; Faems et al., 2010; Laursen and Salter, 2006). This is mainly due to external collaborations carrying costs of search, coordination, management and knowledge exchange which can outweigh the benefits of accessing external knowledge (Teece, 2006). Such costs can be aggravated by the need to establish management mechanisms to prevent any unintended spillovers towards the innovation partners. (Laursen and Salter, 2014).

Most of the literature assumes exogeneity of R&D activities and external knowledge sources when investigating their influence on innovation performance; however, their interrelationship has been often acknowledged by incorporating a moderating effect of internal R&D activities on the breadth and depth of external knowledge sources (Cassiman and Veugelers, 2006; Laursen and Salter, 2006; Hagedoorn and Wang; 2012; Lin et al., 2012). In this paper, we argue that even such moderation effects may offer only a weak approximation to the complex interplay between internal innovation efforts, knowledge sourced from R&D collaborations and firm innovation performance. Indeed, these elements of firm innovation strategy and performance are co-determined and co-evolve and this introduces interrelationships among them (Dosi and Nelson, 2014; Teece, 2006). Such interrelationships imply that internal innovation efforts and knowledge sourced from external R&D collaborations not only have direct effects on firm innovation performance but also exert indirect effects through influencing and mediating one another.

This paper proposes that such complex interrelationships can be captured in an integrative way where allowing for endogeneity, i.e. a feedback loop, between internal innovation efforts and the diversity of external R&D collaboration offering the opportunity to capture direct and indirect effects on innovation performance, otherwise ignored in relevant literature. We frame such complexity by examining the conditions that enable firms to leverage benefits from accessing knowledge from diverse external knowledge sources and how such benefits may be outweighed by: (i) costs associated with accessing increasingly diverse knowledge through collaboration and (ii) a negative network effect on firms’ internal innovation efforts. In particular, internal investments in knowledge generating activities are allowed to directly influence both the diversity of external knowledge sources and firm innovation performance; at the same time, we explore the indirect effect of internal innovation efforts via the diversity of external knowledge on innovation performance. Furthermore, knowledge sourced from external R&D collaborations can have both a direct and an indirect effect on firm innovation performance, through its impact on internal knowledge generation efforts.