The Impact of Interfirm Cooperative R&D on Firm Performance: Evidence from Chinese Publicly Listed Companies

ABSTRACT

With the development of the economy, collaborative R&D has become an important tool for Chinese companies to improve their performance. This paper explores the relationship between inter-firm collaborative R&D and firm performance in terms of both financial performance and technological innovation performance. Using panel data of more than 1,300 Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2016 and using multiple regression analysis, we find that inter-firm collaborative R&D has a positive impact on technological innovation performance and potential market competitiveness, but a negative impact on profitability indicators. In addition, we further divided the companies into technology “leaders” and “followers,” and the results showed that the benefits of collaborative R&D are greater for the followers.

KEYWORDS:

• interfirm cooperative R&D
• financial performance
• technological innovation performance
• technical leaders
• technical followers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Intra-industry collaborative R&Ds refer to the collaborative R&Ds among enterprises producing products of the same industry chain or within the same industry. On the other side, inter-industry collaborative R&Ds refer to the collaborations of enterprises in different industries, and such enterprises are often at the locations of industry chains, allowing the collaborations more widely used.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [42176217 and 72073086]; National Statistical Science Research [2020LY048].