Collaborative innovation in emerging innovation systems: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

Firms often lack the competencies and capabilities for creating and commercializing innovations. The solution to this problem lies in sharing or acquiring relevant resources through collaboration. The success of collaborative relationships depends on the type and the quality of the partners involved and the proximity between them. This is particularly true in the emerging innovation systems of countries in transition from middle to high income levels where structural weaknesses of domestic innovation systems and a lack of internal resources often act as barriers to the development and commercialization of innovations. The objective of this paper is to explore whether collaboration with suppliers, customers, universities and research institutes and intra-group collaboration with partners of different origins facilitates the commercialization of existing marginally modified, incrementally novel and radically novel products in nine emerging innovation systems of Central and Eastern Europe. Treatment analysis on a sample of over 10,000 firms from the Eurostat’s Community Innovation Survey shows that domestic innovation competencies and capabilities mostly drive the commercialization of existing products and that firms rely on a diverse network of collaborators. We find evidence of the positive impact of collaboration on the commercialization of existing products and to a lesser extent on incremental and radical innovations. The relevance of individual collaboration channels differs across countries. Among foreign partners, collaboration with entities from other European Union member states facilitates commercialization of existing products while partners from United States, China and India have positive effects on the commercialization of incremental and radical innovations suggesting that cognitive proximity is more important than geographical, social, organizational and institutional proximities. Recommendations for the formulation of innovation policies in emerging innovation systems are provided.