Management research seminar

Theme group: Knowledge and organisational learning (KOL)

Speaker: professor John Hagedoorn, Royal Holloway/UNI-MERIT

Venue: International Building (INTER-028)

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the history of prior R&D alliances between two partner firms as an important source of variation in collaboration challenges. Our paper sets out to test two key hypotheses. The first hypothesis considers the positive effect that an increase of partner-specific alliance experience has on knowledge transfer in relationships governed by contractual arrangements relative to equity-based arrangements. The second hypothesis refers to the effect of an increase in partner-specific alliance experience that is expected to increase knowledge transfer in alliances with a broad sectoral scope relative to those with a narrow sectoral scope. In order to test these hypotheses, we use a longitudinal data set containing information on the inter-firm R&D relationships maintained by a sample of U.S. firms operating in the information technology industry between 1980 and 1999. Our sample consists of 1,375 relationship-year observations involving 386 firm-partner relationships between 1980 and 1999. Our hypotheses are supported through empirical analyses based on fixed-effects models with linear estimates and fractional logit of estimates of the determinants of inter-firm knowledge transfer, as well as a series of additional tests to examine the robustness of our main findings.