UNU-MERIT Working Papers Series
Formal and informal external linkages and firms’ innovative strategies. A cross-country comparison
Isabel Bodas Freitas, Tommy Clausen, Roberto Fontana & Bart Verspagen #2008-065Firms increasingly rely upon external actors for their innovation
process. Interaction with these actors may occur formally (i.e. through
a collaboration agreement) or informally (i.e. external actors acts as
sources of knowledge). This paper analyses the reasons why firms
consider it to be important to develop formal and informal external
linkages in the innovation process by looking at the role played by
firms’ innovative strategies and by taking into account that a
complementarity or substitutive relationship might exist between formal
and informal linkages. Data come from the Third Community Innovation
Survey (CIS 3), where we have access to firm level micro-data from
Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK.
Keywords: External knowledge sources, Innovation strategy, Formal
cooperation, Multinomial Probit
JEL codes: O31, O33, O38
UNU-MERIT Working Papers
ISSN 1871-9872
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