What Makes SMEs more Likely to Collaborate? Analysing the Role of Regional Innovation Policy

Abstract

The last twenty years have witnessed the diffusion of regional innovation policies supporting networks of innovators. The underlying aim of these policies is to encourage firms, particularly SMEs, to undertake collaborations with organisations possessing complementary knowledge. Focusing on a set of SMEs that have participated, over time, in several innovation networks funded by the same regional 2 government, the paper investigates how their relationships have evolved with respect to the following aspects: (i) reiteration of pre-existing relationships as opposed to experimentation of new relationships; (ii) collaboration with organisations possessing complementary rather than similar knowledge and competencies; (iii) creation of local relationships rather than experimentation of extra-local collaborations; (iv) reliance upon intermediaries to connect with other organisations. Our findings reveal that the involvement in these policy-supported networks changed the firms' relational patterns, leading them to collaborate with a wider variety of agents than those with whom they were linked before the policies. Sectoral heterogeneity had a negative effect on the probability to collaborate, while co-localisation increased the likelihood to collaborate. Mutual involvement with intermediaries also had a positive effect.However, in the case of firm-to-university relationships only specialized intermediaries were likely to perform a positive role and, therefore, encourage networking.

Networked by design: Can policy requirements influence organisations' networking behaviour?

“…This is in line with previous research showing that organisations prefer to partner with similar agents (Caloffi et al, 2015). A certain degree of similarity, which allows organisations to develop a common understanding and a number of complementarities, has been linked to the creation of stable and successful R&D consortia (Bizan, 2003;Häusler et al, 1994;Branstetter and Sakakibara, 2002).…”

“…This is consistent with business service providers playing an intermediary role between other organisations in the networks (Caloffi et al, 2015) and hence being instrumental in supporting greater heterogeneity. Firms instead entered the networks mainly as technology users, sharing this role with other firms.…”

“…This is not to say that these policies did not have any effect, because the average values can conceal very different individual behaviours. In fact, as shown in a more detailed analysis on funded agents' dyadic relationships, individuals seem to have reorganized some of their innovative relationships with specific partners in the sense desired by policymakers (Caloffi et al, 2015). However, our findings appear to suggest that the imposition of simple requirements on network structure is not sufficient to permanently affect an organization's overall networking behaviour over time.…”

“…While there has been some recent interest in the behavioural effects of policies in support of innovation networks (Fier et al, 2006;Chávez, 2011;Antonioli et al, 2014;Caloffi et al, 2015) the field is still relatively new. In particular, an important question for policy design is what kind of networks should be supported, if the objective of the policy is not just to fund successful innovation projects, but also to influence the participants' networking behaviour, enabling them to form networks with desirable features.…”

Reflection of Industrial Structure in Innovative Capability

“…He then attributes characteristic pro-innovation features to the innovation networks, which he summarizes as "4 Is": identification, intelligence, institutions and integration -and understands them as a competitive advantage of the region or country. The policy makers are aware about linkages between innovations and regional development; hence, we could see many regional policies emphasizing innovation networking issue during last years (Caloffi, Rossi & Russo, 2015;He, Macneill & Wang, 2014). The importance of innovation networking in the neo-institutional model concept of the "Triple Helix of university-industry-government" is pointed out by Leydesdorff & Fritsch (2006) (Kraftová, Prášilová & Matěja, 2011).…”