Overcoming innovation barriers through collaboration in emerging countries: the case of Colombian manufacturing firms

ABSTRACT

There has been a growing interest in open innovation strategy as a mechanism to face obstacles in innovative projects in the last three decades. These studies reveal that companies perceiving knowledge and skill shortages prioritise collaboration with universities and public research institutions rather than with other partners. However, most studies addressing the link between collaboration and innovation barriers are conducted in high-income countries. Drawing on the concepts of cognitive distance and absorptive capacities, we propose an analytical framework that challenges the suitability of this finding in the context of less developed economies. We provide evidence supporting this framework’s implications using the case of Colombian manufacturing firms. The resulting underutilisation of knowledge by firms in the context of emerging economies, as a consequence of their cognitive distance from universities and public research institutions, has important policy implications.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation obstacles
• collaboration
• open innovation
• emerging countries
• knowledge transfer

JEL:

• JEL
• O12
• O32
• O36

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ These opposite forces give rise to the idea of a U-inverted shape in the relation between cognitive distance and learning outcomes from collaboration agreements and, consequently, an optimal level of cognitive distance (Nooteboom et al. 2007).

² In the rest of this section, we will assume the vector $\left(x_1,x_2,\dots ,x_K\right)$ as fixed, but we will not include it in the equations to ease readability.: