Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP13622
Authors: Silje Hausreve; Rune Dahl Fitjar; Andrs Rodríguez-Pose
Abstract: Product innovation is widely thought to benefit from collaboration with both scientific and supply-chain partners. The combination of exploration and exploitation capacity, and of scientific and experience-based knowledge, are expected to yield multiplicative effects. However, the assumption that scientific and supply-chain collaboration are complementary and reinforce firm-level innovation has not been examined empirically. This paper tests this assumption on an unbalanced panel sample of 8337 firm observations in Norway, covering the period 2006–2010. The results of the econometric analysis go against the orthodoxy. They show that Norwegian firms do not benefit from doing “more of all” on their road to innovation. While individually both scientific and supply-chain collaboration improve the chances of firm-level innovation, there is a significant negative interaction between them. This implies that scientific and supply-chain collaboration, in contrast to what has been often highlighted, are substitutes rather than complements. The results are robust to the introduction of different controls and hold for all tested innovation outcomes: product innovation, new-to-market product innovation, and share of turnover from new products.
Keywords: innovation; firms; scientific and supply chain collaboration; interaction; norway
JEL Codes: O31; O32; O33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| scientific collaboration (O36) | product innovation (O35) |
| supply chain collaboration (L14) | product innovation (O35) |
| scientific collaboration (O36) | new-to-market product innovation (O36) |
| supply chain collaboration (L14) | new-to-market product innovation (O36) |
| scientific collaboration + supply chain collaboration (O36) | product innovation (O35) |
| scientific collaboration + supply chain collaboration (O36) | new-to-market product innovation (O36) |