Firm R&D units and outsourcing partners: A matching story

We present a theory that examines the optimal match between firm R&D units and external partners for projects that involve problem solving. We have a firm selecting an external partner conditional on the learning costs of its internal R&D unit. We show that there exists a matching equilibrium with property that external partners with low learning costs for a project work with R\&D units that also have low learning costs for the same project. Empirically, we use a dataset of Spanish R\&D firms and relate their share of R&D outsourcing to universities to the composition of their R&D units, described by the presence of staff with a PhD. Our main finding is that, controlling for endogeneity, firms that employ R\&D staff with a PhD outsource relatively more to universities than to firms. We interpret this result as evidence that R&D units with relatively low learning costs for basic projects tend to match with external partners, universities, with relatively low learning costs for the same projects.

Open strategies and innovation performance

Scholarly interest in the relationship between open strategies and innovation performance has been unfailing, and in recent years has even increased. The present paper focuses on inbound open strategies and reviews various approaches (transaction costs, competences, open innovation) dealing with firms´ decisions about these strategies. The different approaches result in different conclusions about the optimum level of openness. The different approaches are tested empirically taking account of the different degrees of openness (closed, semiopen, open, ultraopen) and their effects on sales of new–to-the-market products, and using a panel of Spanish firms from a CIS-type survey for 2004-2008. Our results show that closed and semiopen strategies are the most common among Spanish firms and that open strategies produce the best performance, while semiopen strategies are more effective than closed ones. These results hold across different subsamples based on firm size and industry, and are robust to different ways of defining the indicators and to different estimation methods.open innovation strategies, collaboration, transaction costs, competences, CIS surveys, R&D, technology policy