Share:


Firms pursuit of innovations through internationalization: a treatment effect estimation

    Samuel Amponsah Odei Affiliation
    ; Jan Stejskal   Affiliation

Abstract

Firms participations in international markets is known to stimulate innovations as well as expose them to both international and domestic partners that can influence their innovation prospects and activities. Countries with weaker innovation potentials acquire advanced knowledge, technologies and innovations when they interact and collaborate with partners in the international ecosystem. The focus of this paper is to explore the linkage between firm’s decisions to internationalize and its additionality effects on firm-level innovations. Our results show a positive and significant correlations between these firms’ participation in international markets and their product, process, research and development and acquisition of external knowledge. We also find that, the foreign enterprise group, foreign clients and customers from the private sector as well as foreign consultants were vital for firms’ innovation. In contrast we find that there is no relationship between foreign ownership and firms’ innovations as can be seen from the insignificant coefficients results. The ATE results show that the extent of internationalizations increased the probabilities of stimulating product, process innovations and R&D on average by 21, 14 and 9 percentage points in comparison with firms that didn’t internationalize. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.


First published online 8 May 2020

Keyword : internationalization, innovations, knowledge, technologies, collaborations, partners, Czech Republic

How to Cite
Odei, S. A., & Stejskal, J. (2020). Firms pursuit of innovations through internationalization: a treatment effect estimation. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 26(4), 837-866. https://doi.org/10.3846/tede.2020.12484
Published in Issue
Jun 12, 2020
Abstract Views
1759
PDF Downloads
743
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

References

Abadie, A., Drukker, D., Herr, J. L., & Imbens, G. W. (2004). Implementing matching estimators for average treatment effects in Stata. The Stata Journal, 4(3), 290–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536867X0400400307

Abbasi, F., Motavasseli, M., Zali, M. R., Faghih, N., & Meigounpoory, M. R. (2019). How does technological innovation come from? a multilevel framework. International Transaction Journal of Engineering, Management, & Applied Sciences & Technologies. 10(4), 527–550. https://doi.org/10.14456/ITJEMAST.2019.50

Alexander, A. T., & Martin, D. P. (2013). Intermediaries for open innovation: A competence-based comparison of knowledge transfer offices practices. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 80(1), 38–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2012.07.013

Amoroso, S. (2017). Multilevel heterogeneity of R&D cooperation and innovation determinants. Eurasian Business Review, 7(1), 93–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40821-015-0041-1

Antonelli, C., & Fassio, C. (2016). The role of external knowledge (s) in the introduction of product and process innovations. R&D Management, 46(S3), 979–991. https://doi.org/10.1111/radm.12159

Ayala, N. F., Paslauski, C. A., Ghezzi, A., & Frank, A. G. (2017). Knowledge sharing dynamics in service suppliers’ involvement for servitization of manufacturing companies. International Journal of Production Economics, 193, 538–553. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2017.08.019

Back, Y., Parboteeah, K., & Nam, D. (2014). Innovation in emerging markets: The role of management consulting firms. Journal of International Management, 20(4), 390–405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intman.2014.07.001

Baumann, J., & Kritikos, A. S. (2016). The link between R&D, innovation and productivity: Are micro firms different?. Research Policy, 45(6), 1263–1274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.03.008

Belderbos, R., Gilsing, V., Lokshin, B., Carree, M., & Sastre, J. F. (2018). The antecedents of new R&D collaborations with different partner types: On the dynamics of past R&D collaboration and innovative performance. Long Range Planning, 51(2), 285–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2017.10.002

Bianchi, M., Croce, A., Dell’Era, C., Di Benedetto, C. A., & Frattini, F. (2016). Organizing for inbound open innovation: how external consultants and a dedicated R & D unit influence product innovation performance. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 33(4), 492–510. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12302

Boermans, M. A., & Roelfsema, H. (2015). The effects of internationalization on innovation: Firm-level evidence for transition economies. Open Economies Review, 26(2), 333–350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11079-014-9334-8

Busom, I., & Fernández-Ribas, A. (2008). The impact of firm participation in R&D programmes on R&D partnerships. Research policy, 37(2), 240–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2007.11.002

Cassiman, B., & Golovko, E. (2011). Innovation and internationalization through exports. Journal of International Business Studies, 42(1), 56–75. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2010.36

Cattaneo, M. D. (2010). Efficient semiparametric estimation of multi-valued treatment effects under ignorability. Journal of Econometrics, 155(2), 138–154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2009.09.023

Cavusgil, S. T., & Knight, G. (2015). The born global firm: An entrepreneurial and capabilities perspective on early and rapid internationalization. Journal of International Business Studies, 46(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2014.62

Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. Routledge Academic.

Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1989). Innovation and learning: the two faces of R & D. The Economic Journal, 99(397), 569–596. https://doi.org/10.2307/2233763

Dabić, M., Daim, T. U., Aralica, Z., & Bayraktaroglu, A. E. (2012). Exploring relationships among internationalization, choice for research and development approach and technology source and resulting innovation intensity: Case of a transition country Croatia. The Journal of High Technology Management Research, 23(1), 15–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hitech.2012.03.002

Dachs, B., & Peters, B. (2014). Innovation, employment growth, and foreign ownership of firms: A European perspective. Research Policy, 43(1), 214–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2013.08.001

Fox, J. (2015). Applied regression analysis and generalized linear models. Sage Publications.

Fu, X., Pietrobelli, C., & Soete, L. (2011). The role of foreign technology and indigenous innovation in the emerging economies: Technological change and catching-up. World Development, 39(7), 1204–1212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2010.05.009

Gërguri‐Rashiti, S., Ramadani, V., Abazi‐Alili, H., Dana, L. P., & Ratten, V. (2017). ICT, innovation and firm performance: the transition economies context. Thunderbird International Business Review, 59(1), 93–102. https://doi.org/10.1002/tie.21772

Gkypali, A., Arvanitis, S., & Tsekouras, K. (2018). Absorptive capacity, exporting activities, innovation openness and innovation performance: A SEM approach towards a unifying framework. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 132, 143–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2018.01.025

Gore, R., & Reynolds, P. F. (2012, June). Reducing confounding bias in predicate-level statistical debugging metrics. In 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 463–473). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227169

Guimón, J., & Salazar-Elena, J. C. (2015). Collaboration in innovation between foreign subsidiaries and local universities: Evidence from Spain. Industry and Innovation, 22(6), 445–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2015.1089034

Hájek, P., & Stejskal, J. (2018). R&D cooperation and knowledge spillover effects for sustainable business innovation in the chemical industry. Sustainability, 10(4), 1064. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10041064

Halaskova, M., Halaskova, R., & Prokop, V. (2018). Evaluation of efficiency in selected areas of public services in European Union countries. Sustainability, 10(12), 4592. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10124592

Henttonen, K., Hurmelinna‐Laukkanen, P., & Ritala, P. (2016). Managing the appropriability of R&D collaboration. R&D Management, 46(S1), 145–158. https://doi.org/10.1111/radm.12121

Hsieh, W. L., Ganotakis, P., Kafouros, M., & Wang, C. (2018). Foreign and domestic collaboration, product innovation novelty, and firm growth. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 35(4), 652–672. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12435

Hudec, O. (2015). Visegrad countries and regions: Innovation performance and effi ciency. Quality Innovation Prosperity, 19(2), 55–72. https://doi.org/10.12776/qip.v19i2.593

Hudec, O., & Prochádzková, M. (2018). The evolution of innovation networks in Slovakia: Disintegration and slow recovery. In Knowledge Spillovers in Regional Innovation Systems (pp. 133–161). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67029-4_5

Johanson, J., & Mattsson, L. G. (2015). Internationalisation in industrial systems – a network approach. In Knowledge, networks and power (pp. 111–132). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137508829_5

Kock, N. (2015). Common method bias in PLS-SEM: A full collinearity assessment approach. International Journal of e-Collaboration (IJeC), 11(4), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijec.2015100101

Lee, K., Szapiro, M., & Mao, Z. (2018). From global value chains (GVC) to innovation systems for local value chains and knowledge creation. The European Journal of Development Research, 30(3), 424–441. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-018-0160-5

Lewandowska, M. S., Szymura-Tyc, M., & Gołębiowski, T. (2016). Innovation complementarity, cooperation partners, and new product export: Evidence from Poland. Journal of Business Research, 69(9), 3673–3681. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.03.028

Li, M., Petruzzi, N. C., & Zhang, J. (2016). Overconfident competing newsvendors. Management Science, 63(8), 2637–2646. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2469

Martinez, L. F., Ferreira, A. I., & Can, A. B. (2016). Consultant–client relationship and knowledge transfer in small-and medium-sized enterprises change processes. Psychological Reports, 118(2), 608–625. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294116639429

Morrison, A., Pietrobelli, C., & Rabellotti, R. (2008). Global value chains and technological capabilities: a framework to study learning and innovation in developing countries. Oxford Development Studies, 36(1), 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600810701848144

Nieto, M. J., & Santamaría, L. (2007). The importance of diverse collaborative networks for the novelty of product innovation. Technovation, 27(6–7), 367–377. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2006.10.001

Odei, S. A., & Stejskal, J. (2018a). The influence of knowledge sources on firm-level innovation: The case of Slovak and Hungarian manufacturing firms. Central European Business Review, 7(2), 61–74. https://doi.org/10.18267/j.cebr.199

Odei, S. A., & Stejskal, J. (2018b). Factors influencing spin-off activities at universities: Empirical evidence from the United Kingdom. In 21st International Colloquium on Regional Sciences (pp. 117–124).

Odei, S. A., & Stejskal, J. (2019). Do firms R&D collaborations with the science system and enterprise group partners stimulate their product and process innovations?. Economies, 7(2), 43. https://doi.org/10.3390/economies7020043

Park, A. D., Yang, Shi, X., & Jiang, Y. (2010). Exporting and firm performance: Chinese exporters and the Asian financial crisis. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(4), 822–842. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00033

Pavlák, M. (2018). Barriers to the internationalization of Czech SMEs. European Research Studies Journal, 21(2), 453–462. https://doi.org/10.35808/ersj/1014

Pavlínek, P. (2017). Dependent growth: Foreign investment and the development of the automotive industry in East-Central Europe. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53955-3

Pietrobelli, C., & Rabellotti, R. (2011). Global value chains meet innovation systems: Are there learning opportunities for developing countries?. World Development, 39(7), 1261–1269. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2010.05.013

Pilav-Velić, A., & Marjanovic, O. (2016). Integrating open innovation and business process innovation: Insights from a large-scale study on a transition economy. Information & Management, 53(3), 398–408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2015.12.004

Piperopoulos, P., Wu, J., & Wang, C. (2018). Outward FDI, location choices and innovation performance of emerging market enterprises. Research Policy, 47(1), 232–240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.11.001

Porter, M. E. (1998). The Adam Smith address: Location, clusters, and the “new” microeconomics of competition. Business Economics, 33(1), 7–13.

Prokop, V., Stejskal, J., & Hudec, O. (2019). Collaboration for innovation in small CEE countries. Economics and Management, 22(1), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2019-1-009

Ramadani, V., Abazi-Alili, H., Dana, L. P., Rexhepi, G., & Ibraimi, S. (2017). The impact of knowledge spillovers and innovation on firm-performance: findings from the Balkans countries. International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, 13(1), 299–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-016-0393-8

Rõigas, K., Mohnen, P., & Varblane, U. (2018). Which firms use universities as cooperation partners? – A comparative view in Europe. International Journal of Technology Management, 76(1–2), 32–57. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2419188

Santamaria, L., & Surroca, J. (2011). Matching the goals and impacts of R&D collaboration. European Management Review, 8(2), 95–109. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-4762.2011.01012.x

Soh, P. H., & Subramanian, A. M. (2014). When do firms benefit from university–industry R&D collaborations? The implications of firm R&D focus on scientific research and technological recombination. Journal of Business Venturing, 29(6), 807–821. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2013.11.001

Srholec, M. (2005, December). Innovation strategies of multinationals: Firm-level evidence from foreign affiliates in the Czech Republic. In Proceedings from the 31th EIBA Annual Conference, Oslo.

Stejskal, J., & Hajek, P. (2015, August). Modelling knowledge spillover effects using moderated and mediation analysis – The case of Czech high-tech industries. In International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations (pp. 329–341). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21009-4_25

Un, C. A. (2017). Absorptive capacity and R&D outsourcing. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 43, 34–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jengtecman.2017.01.001

Un, C. A., & Asakawa, K. (2015). Types of R&D collaborations and process innovation: The benefit of collaborating upstream in the knowledge chain. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 32(1), 138–153. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12229

Un, C. A., & Rodríguez, A. (2018). Local and global knowledge complementarity: R&D collaborations and innovation of foreign and domestic firms. Journal of International Management, 24(2), 137–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intman.2017.09.001

Velichkovsky, B. B., Solovyev, V. D., Bochkarev, V. V., & Ishkineeva, F. F. (2019). Transition to market economy promotes individualistic values: Analysing changes in frequencies of Russian words from 1980 to 2008. International Journal of Psychology, 54(1), 23–32. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12411

Zapletalová, Š. (2018). A research study of internationalization processes of the Czech family businesses in turbulent markets. Review of Integrative Business and Economics Research, 7(3), 1–24.

Zhang, J., Ma, Z., & Chen, G. (2014). Robustness of cluster synchronous patterns in small-world networks with inter-cluster co-competition balance. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 24(2), 023111. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4873524