The Impact of Cooperation on Firms’ Innovation Propensity in Emerging Economies

Abstract

The importance of collaboration has been one of the main issues in innovation studies. Despite many different findings on collaboration and its impact on innovation performance, the impact of different types of collaboration on different types of innovation is still inconclusive. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of openness on the performance of the innovation process in a leading emerging economy. Based on Turkish CIS data, the findings reveal that doing R&D either continuously or occasionally affects the probability to introduce novelties. Conducting simultaneously marketing, organisational and process innovations also increases the likelihood to innovate. Furthermore, cooperation with partners and their effects on innovation propensity unveil that process, marketing and organisational innovations are determinants of product and service innovation, thus confirming that the various innovation types are intertwined and mutually supporting each other. From a geographical perspective, cooperating with external parties from the same country plays a dominant role in determining the innovation outcome. Cooperating with consultants and private labs on the other hand seems to negatively affect innovation performance. Surprisingly, the role of foreign cooperation remains ambiguous as results were not statistically significant. Another very interesting finding is the negative impact of firms’ size on innovation propensity. This paper, apart from its contribution to collaboration research, provides concise recommendations for policy makers and managers.

Keywords

• Open innovation
• performance
• cooperation
• emerging and transition economies