Collaboration for innovation and project failure. A dynamic analysis

The aim of this paper is to investigate the hypothesis that there is a complex and bidirectional relation between collaboration and failure in innovation projects. On the one hand, collaboration in innovative activities may increase the likelihood of project failure. At the same time, the failure in innovation projects may induce the firm to collaborate in order to overcome the problems that determined the failure of innovation projects (induced collaboration). Up to now, we are not aware about the existence of any empirical paper analysing the interaction between these two mechanisms. This paper aims at filling this gap by providing a motivation for the induced collaboration and testing its empirical relevance in a dynamic framework. The empirical analysis is carried out by using two consecutive German Community Innovation Surveys referring to the period 2006–2010. The empirical results support the hypothesis of a bidirectional causal relationship between collaboration and failure.     

A note on the relationship between the total factor productivity and the network of firms

In this paper we study the robustness of the results found recently by Guzzini and Palestrini (J Econ Interact Coord 11:35–55, 2016). Since the original analysis was carried out in a static setting, we perform a dynamic panel analysis by using the same dataset. The inclusion of the lagged value of the endogenous variable, missing in the original paper, could be justified for several reasons. Firstly, the statistical relationship may have itself a dynamical nature; secondly the inclusion of lagged-endogenous variable is a way to mitigate the possibility of an omitted variable problem. We find that the results are only qualitatively the same, and we discuss the quantitative differences.

     

Ownership as R&D incentive in business groups

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are supposed to be less likely to conduct formal R&D because of the lack of financial resources, weaker competencies, and the absence of scale and scope economies. These limitations may be overcome when an SME belongs to a business group. Empirical studies have shown that firms belonging to business groups have a higher propensity to engage in R&D. We demonstrate that this higher propensity depends on the ownership of controlled companies, besides the presence of coordination mechanisms. We develop a model, and we empirically test its predictions using a data set of Italian SMEs operating in the manufacturing sector. From the model we derive three main implications: (1) there is no difference in R&D propensity between standalone firms and firms at the bottom of groups; (2) head and intermediate firms have a higher R&D propensity than standalone firms and firms at the bottom of the group; (3) the intensity of R&D depends on the ownership of controlled firms and on their size. Overall, the results of the empirical analysis are in accordance with the implications of the model.     

Growth in total factor productivity and links among firms

In this paper we study the relevance of links among firms in explaining the mean and the auto-correlation property of the aggregate total factor productivity rate of growth (Solow residual). Our approach relies on the interaction between idiosyncratic shocks of firms and the network structure of firms. We analytically study this phenomenon using the adjacency matrix of a complete network and we present a simulation with more general random adjacency matrices. We also check empirically, using Italian data, the relationship between the network structure and the Solow residual. In particular, in the empirical part, we find two main results: firstly, the relationship between the Solow residual and the measure of connectivity of firms is positive, in accordance with the analytical results. Secondly, we find that the measure of connectivity is pro-cyclical with the annual growth rate of industrial production.