The effect of cooperation at different stages of innovation process on company’s performance

Abstract

Existing research has highlighted the importance of cooperation in innovation. However, there still is insufficient understanding of how cooperation is linked to the stages of innovation process. Current working paper aims to answer the following research questions: (1) At what stages of innovation process do the companies cooperate more: when they create or commercialize innovation? (2) Does the cooperation in innovation depend on the relational learning capability? (3) On what stage does cooperation stronger influence the company's performance? We answer these questions by examining innovation cooperation on example of a sample of 157 Russian firms. The finding highlight the role of relational learning and indicate distinctive characteristics of cooperation at the early and the late innovation process stages.