Seminarios del IPP: "The Role of Public External Knowledge for Firm Innovativeness"

Sala María Zambrano 0C9

Por Óscar Vicente (Universidad de Valencia) 

Organiza: IPP-CSIC

Coordina: Francisco Herreros (IPP-CSIC)

Invita: Catalina Martínez (IPP-CSIC)

Resumen: Public research institutes (PRIs) and universities receive large amounts of public funds for the generation and transmission of knowledge and companies contract external knowledge from both of them. An important question for a firm’s management of its R&D is what is more beneficial to generate firm innovations, external knowledge created by PRIs or by universities? In this paper, we assess the differential impact of external knowledge from PRIs versus external knowledge from universities on firm innovativeness. We use information of R&D acquisitions from a panel dataset of more than 10,000 Spanish firms from 2005 to 2014. Using a difference-in-difference estimator, we show that external knowledge from both organizations increase firm innovativeness. Our results suggest that the knowledge generated by PRIs is more sensitive to the absorptive capacities of the firm than the knowledge generated by universities. This has implications for the management of R&D and organizational strategies of the knowledge activities of firms. Firms that obtain external knowledge from universities might not have incentives to invest in their internal R&D. In contrast, R&D managers might plan both their external and internal R&D if they acquire external R&D from PRIs.

Autores: María García-Vega (University of Nottingham) & Óscar Vicente-Chirivella (Universidad de Valencia)