Collaboration partners, slack resources and firm's innovation performance

Firms rely more and more on external collaboration partners to reduce the R&D cost as well as shorten the product life cycle. Open innovation become a new paradigm for firms to become competitive in a highly dynamic business environment. Firm's collaboration partner extents from customers, suppliers to university, research institute, and even competitors, the resource based view hold that different partner can provide with complementary resources and add more fuel to firm's innovation while the transaction cost theory hold that the coordination, communication traveling and the exchange of information among the involved collaboration partners will increase the innovation cost. Based on various theory foundations, this research want to highlight how does the collaboration partners influence firm's innovation performance, and how does firm's resource redundancy influence the interaction result of firms and various partners. This study underline the importance of collaboration partner in process of firm's innovation, and highlight the role of slack resource in the interaction between external collaboration partner and firm's innovation performance.