SUMMARYThis study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and R&D collaboration in Germany and Finland. We consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments, and perform an econometric matching to analyze R&D and patent activity at the firm level. In general, we find that collaboration has positive effects. In Germany, subsidies for individual research do neither exhibit a significant impact on R&D nor on patenting, but the innovative performance could be improved by additional incentives for collaboration. For Finnish companies, public funding is an important source of finance for R&D. Without subsidies, recipients would show less R&D and patenting activity, whilst those firms not receiving subsidies would perform significantly better if they were publicly funded.

This paper develops an indicator framework for examining open innovation practices and their impact on performance. The analysis, which is based on Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data for Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Norway, yields a number of interesting results. First, we find that open innovation practices have a strong impact on innovation performance. Second, results suggest that broad-based approaches yield the strongest impacts, and that the collective of open innovation strategies appear more important than individual practices. Third, intramural investments are still important for innovative performance, stressing that open innovation is not a substitute for internal knowledge building.

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This paper investigates the relationship between new product introduction, and three constructs (search, collaboration and external R&D) developed to capture the different means by which firms link internal R&D to external inputs. By including interaction effects and applying detailed marginal effects analysis, it sheds new light on a research question, which has generated much empirical ambiguity. Search diversity and collaboration diversity measure the extent to which different types of information sources and collaboration partners are used. Both affect innovation performance positively, and are complementary to each other. External R&D measures the relative importance of contract R&D, and is found to have a conditional negative impact which is reduced by search and reinforced when combined with collaboration. When including interaction effects involving the overall R&D intensity of firms, our findings suggest the existence of two competing ideal types of open innovation strategy and organization.