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This study focuses on the effectiveness of sequential adaption of diversification strategies of R&D collaboration to improve firms' innovation performance. While accounting for the firm's initial simultaneous collaboration pattern, we investigate if certain sequential adaption strategies of firms' collaboration patterns are more beneficial to achieve specific innovation objectives. Our panel data analysis method uses firm level data from five waves of the Swiss innovation survey covering a period from 1999 to 2011. Our analysis confirms the results of previous empirical studies regarding simultaneous R&D collaboration, though our findings shed light on the importance of sequential adaption of firms' collaboration strategies, and indicate a careful selection of partner types in line with the firm's needs and objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers have an increasing interest in designing appropriate public R&D policy programs to stimulate national innovativeness and competitiveness. First, this study investigates the effects of public R&D subsidies on firms' R&D investments accounting for the collaboration pattern of the subsidized firms. Second, this representative analysis further puts light on the effectiveness of the publicly induced R&D investment, and examines if the policy-induced investments translate into higher innovation performance, thereby disentangling between radical and incremental innovation. The treatment effects analysis uses firm level data from five waves (1999, 2002, 2005, 2008, and 2011) of the Swiss innovation survey. The findings show that on average the receipt of an R&D subsidy translate into higher firm R&D investments. While the results do not exhibit any additional systemic positive support for collaboration in the presence of a subsidy, and the publicly induced R&D investment mainly foster radical innovation output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovations are rarely generated in complete isolation. Due to the inherent uncertainty, the manifold underlying knowledge base and high financial investments, firms seek to integrate external partners for the generation of new products and processes. However there is an ongoing debate whether firms, which develop their innovations in close cooperation with external partners, such as suppliers, customers and governmental research institutions, can benefit with respect to innovation performance in contrast to firms which cooperate less. This paper aims at investigating how diversity in cooperation partners effects the firms' output innovation performance in terms of generated sales with innovative products. To address this question the authors analyze a large-scale sample of microdata from Swiss firms derived from four waves (1999, 2002, 2005, and 2008) of the Swiss innovation survey data according to the European Community Innovation Survey, applying a panel data analysis. The findings suggest, that firms with a higher diversity in cooperation partners could benefit in generating new product innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]