Catch‐up through Collaborative Innovation: Evidence from China

Collaborative innovation has received the attention of management scholars for decades. The primary focus of our research is to explore the mechanisms that drive innovation catch‐up of latecomers in an emerging economy through research and development collaborations (i.e., academic and industrial collaborations). Using a sample of 1,066 firms in a high‐tech cluster in China, we find that collaborative innovation strategy has an inverse U–shaped effect on a firm's innovation performance. In addition, the relationship between collaborative innovation strategy and innovation performance is positively moderated by absorptive capacity © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.