The Effect of Collaboration with Different Partners: A Contingency Model

Focusing on innovation collaboration, this paper examines the different roles of three types of innovation collaboration on firms' innovation performance, and assesses whether the effect of such collaboration is conditional on internal and external context characteristics in emerging economies. The regression results reveal that both the collaboration with science-based partners and the collaboration with foreign business partners are positively related to a firm's innovation performance, while collaboration with domestic business partners is negatively related to a firm's innovation performance. Our research also shows that prior knowledge stock positively moderates the influence of collaboration with both foreign business partners and science-based partners, while negatively moderates the influence of collaboration with domestic business partners; connections to institutional structure positively moderates the influence of collaboration with foreign business partners, while negatively moderates the influence of collaboration with science-based partners collaboration with domestic business partners. Our research contributes to existing open innovation research.