Firm-Level Evidence on the Cooperative Innovation Strategies in Russian Manufacturing

Abstract

This paper focuses on revealing the heterogeneous impact of firms’ specificities and the environment on the sophistication of the cooperative innovation strategies. We use the firm-level data on innovation strategies of over 1200 manufacturing enterprises in Russia to model the networking strategy as a simultaneous choice of the range of cooperative linkages (within and beyond the value chain and knowledge production sectors). The determinants comprise the internal factors (as absorptive capacity) and the external conditions (e.g. technological opportunities, appropriability and competition regimes). Revealed effects prove the initial heterogeneity hypothesis thus challenging the wide-spread simplified perception of ‘openness’ of the innovation strategy as a one-dimensional characteristic