R&d offshoring and firm's innovativeness: the role of firms', regional, and sectoral characteristics
- Autores: Damián Tojeiro Rivero
- Directores de la Tesis: Rosina Moreno Serrano (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: José García Quevedo (presid.), Lorena M. D'Agostino (secret.), Mercedes Teruel Carrizosa (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Economía por la Universidad de Barcelona
- Materias:
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- Resumen
R&D offshoring and firm's innovativeness: The role of firms', regional, and sectoral characteristics.
R&D offshoring is the central area of work around which this dissertation gravitates. However, I am also interested in understanding how the environment in which firms operate may affect the processes of firms’ innovation through the acquisition of external knowledge. Throughout the thesis, R&D offshoring is understood as the market based transaction through licensing and/or contractual agreements of a client enterprise acquiring external R&D from another institution located abroad (Cusmano et al., 2009), also known as offshoring outsourcing (Nieto and Rodríguez, 2011) or international outsourcing (Phene et al., 2006), with the objective of performing innovation activities.
The dissertation consists of three essays with a marked empirical orientation, which are intended to be a contribution to the Economics of Innovation and Economic Geography literatures. Each of the chapters constitutes a separate piece of research in itself and are developed according to their own structure and methodological framework.
Chapter 2 explores R&D offshoring’s role in radical product innovations. These innovations are important for companies’ growth strategies, and I check the extent to which companies rely on external sources, which may bring knowledge that differs significantly from that already present internally. The evidence for Spanish firms between 2004 and 2013 shows that R&D offshoring influences significantly the intensity of radical but not of incremental innovations. This influence is apparently smaller when external knowledge comes from universities or research institutions rather than from the business sector. The recent financial crisis also exerted a detrimental effect on this influence, as compared with the previous period of economic growth.
Besides, much has been said about the role that technological networking activities play on the innovative performance of firms, but little is known about how the regional context influences the efficiency of such networking activities. In chapter 3, I hypothesize that the transformation of firms’ networking activities into innovation may vary depending on the regional environment in which the firm is located. For Spanish manufactures in the period 2000-12 and through the use of a multilevel framework, I obtain that after controlling for the firm’s characteristics, the regional context has not only a direct effect on firms’ innovation performance, but it also conditions the returns to firms’ networking activities, although differently in the case of cooperation and outsourcing. Cooperating in innovation activities is more beneficial for those firms located in a knowledge intensive region, whereas R&D outsourcing seems to be more profitable for firms in regions with a low knowledge pool.
Finally, the Open Innovation literature has posited the importance for enterprises of accessing to external knowledge in order to survive, grow, and to approximate to leadership. For a sample of manufacturing and services sectors in the period 2005-15, the fourth chapter argue that R&D offshoring is not just a matter of firm’s decision as in previous literature, but also has an important industrial level component. The study also looks for the heterogeneous effects of internal knowledge base characteristics of enterprises, paying special attention to inter-sectoral differences in knowledge acquisition. The evidence points to industrial R&D offshoring presenting an inverted U-shape with respect to the firms’ innovative processes. In addition, firms presenting higher experiences in networking present lower damages coming from sectoral externalities, while firms with higher levels of human capital are found to obtain higher returns coming from the offshoring externalities. Overall, it seems that a strategy (R&D offshoring) that is highly beneficial for all enterprises individually might be also optimal for the Spanish economy.
