Promote or inhibit? The influence of partner repeatedness in university-industry alliance portfolios on firm innovation performance

ABSTRACT

Constructing a portfolio of university-industry (UI) alliances with multiple academic institutions simultaneously has been pervasive for emerging market firms. However, whether repeated partnerships in focal firms’ UI alliance portfolios influence firm innovation performance remains unknown. Using the unbalanced panel data from Chinese manufacturing firms, we theorise and find that UI alliance portfolio partner repeatedness has a negative effect on focal firms’ innovation performance. Besides, we examine the boundary conditions under which UI alliance portfolio partner repeatedness influences firm innovation performance. We find that both institutional development and market competition weaken the negative effect of UI alliance portfolio partner repeatedness on firm innovation performance. This study contributes to previous studies and provides practical implications for both firm managers and policymakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Partner repeatedness
• UI alliance portfolio
• firm innovation
• institutional development
• market competition

JEL:

• L25
• M10
• O32

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No. LQ22G020005 and LQ22G030012); the Project of Zheshang Research Institute of Zhejiang Gongshang University (No. 22ZSKT03YB); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72202239, 72202214, and 72091313); and the National Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (No. 2022JJ40654). We are grateful to Associate Editor Holmer Kok and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.