Promoting cooperation in innovation ecosystems: evidence from European traditional manufacturing SMEs

Abstract

We investigate whether public support for innovation increases the propensity of SMEs in traditional manufacturing industries to cooperate for innovation-in particular, for incremental innovation-with other firms and external knowledge providers. Using data from seven EU regions, we find that support programmes do not promote cooperation with competitors, marginally promote cooperation with customers and suppliers and strongly promote cooperation with knowledge providers. These findings suggest that, in this case, the role of public policy is systems conforming rather than systems creating. Innovation support programmes can assist SMEs in traditional manufacturing industry to consolidate and/or extend their innovation ecosystems beyond familiar business partners by promoting cooperation with both private and public sector knowledge providers. Finally, our findings suggest that evaluation studies of innovation support programmes should be designed to capture not only input and/or output additionality but also behavioural and systemic effects.

Collaboration with External Organizations and Technological Innovations: Evidence from Spanish Manufacturing Firms

“…The resource-based view regards firms as bundles of tangible and intangible resources [11]. It proposes that firms cooperate with different partners to access external resources that are complementary to firms' internal resource and thus exploit synergies between them [12][13][14][15]. The knowledge-based view regards firms as institutional knowledge creators and facilitators [16], in particular regarding the transformation of tacit into explicit knowledge that can be used for the development of new products and processes [7].…”

“…Another benefit of cooperating with universities relative to other partners is the low possibility of opportunistic behavior and knowledge leakages. Therefore, firms do not have to be particularly concerned how to protect their intellectual property and whether universities will share their knowledge of the focal firm's production and organizational processes with other firms [15]. Moreover, cooperation with universities and other public institutions should be particularly dominant in firms further away from the technological frontier, given their limited technological and financial resources [15,34].…”

“…Cooperation with customers can facilitate product innovation as customers can reveal their preferences and unfulfilled needs to the focal firm [17,35]. The joint development of a new product could improve market share and product credibility, and potentially reduce risks associated with the commercialization of new products [12,14,15]. However, sometimes customers might not be aware of their preferences and even more so of their unmet needs.…”

“…Accordingly, collaboration with suppliers should have a smaller impact on product innovation than HEIs, but a larger impact compared to customers and competitors [7]. Cooperating with suppliers will enable firms to access more limited new knowledge, as both the focal firm and its suppliers operate in the same or similar industries [15]. However, cooperation with suppliers is still beneficial to the focal firm as they have complementary capabilities and share common goals [7,17].…”

“…These appropriation issues often result in knowledge exchange being limited to explicit knowledge, and thus excluding tacit knowledge exchange [36]. Empirical studies on R&D cooperation usually report the smallest number of firms cooperating with competitors (see, e.g., [14,15]) given that trust has been recognized as the necessary success factor for R&D cooperation [15,35,37,[39][40][41][42]. However, although firms avoid collaborating with competitors, this type of collaboration is most frequently found in high-technology sectors, as firms in these sectors are continuous innovators, engaged in large and risky R&D investments.…”