The effects of R&D cooperation on innovation performance in the knowledge-intensive business services industry: focusing on the moderating effect of the R&D-dedicated labor ratio

ABSTRACT

This study conducted an empirical estimation of the effects of R&D cooperation and the proportion of R&D personnel on the performance of four different kinds of innovation in the two major KIBS industries (t-KIBS and p-KIBS). For the empirical analysis, we used a multivariate probit model with 956 samples from the KIBS industry collected using the officially adopted Korean Innovation Survey of 2016. We found that vertical R&D cooperation had a positive effect on the overall performance in the t-KIBS industry, especially on service and marketing performances. On the other hand, horizontal R&D cooperation (competitor and institutional innovation) had a heterogeneous effect on the innovation of the KIBS industry depending on the type of cooperation. The proportion of R&D-dedicated personnel had a positive effect on service product innovation in the p-KIBS industry, but contrary to expectation, a high proportion of R&D personnel had no positive moderating effect with R&D cooperation in improving innovation performance. On the contrary, a high proportion of R&D personnel combined with institutional cooperation negatively affected the achievement of service innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS)
• innovation performance
• R&D cooperation
• R&D-dedicated labor ratio

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 One recent study related to KIBS from the viewpoint of territorial servitization is Liu et al. (2019).

2 There are many empirical analysis results in which the relationship between R&D cooperation and innovation performance in manufacturing is not positive. For instance, R&D cooperation with competitors had a negative impact on innovation performance due to information leakage and hold up problems (Bayona, García-Marco, and Huerta 2001); cooperation with suppliers due to its limited usefulness for R&D on the firm’s own products (Le Roy, Robert, and Lasch 2016), cooperation with customers due to difficulty in converting tacit and complex knowledge owned by customers into explicit knowledge (Nonaka 1994), and cooperation with institutions due to weak appropriability conditions (Medda, Piga, and Siegel 2006).

3 Miles, Belousova, and Chichkanov (2017), a major early study of KIBS, classified KIBS into two categories: t-KIBS and p-KIBS. Based on this study, we matched the detailed sectors of KSIC (9th) with the sectors of Miles et al. (1995, 2017).

4 The most correlated coefficient value was 0.792 and the variation inflation factor was no more than 7.34, indicating no problem with multicollinearity (See Appendix A).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Junhwa Choi

Junhwa Choi is a PhD student at the Graduate School of Technology and Innovation Management of Hanyang University, Korea. He received M.B.A. from the Graduate School of Business Administration of Korea University. His research interests lie in corporate R&D cooperation.

Jae Young Choi

Jae Young Choi holds a PhD from the Technology Management, Economics and Policy Program at Seoul National University. He is currently an associate professor at the Graduate School of Technology and Innovation Management of Hanyang University, Korea. His research interests include econometric modelling and empirical studies regarding IT Industry & R&D management.