نوآوری پر خطر (ریسک دار) : تأثیر استراتژی های داخلی و خارجی تحقیق و توسعه بر توزیع سود

External innovation increases the profits of the median firm, but also increases dispersion and the kurtosis of the distribution of profits. This means that external strategies are risky and may require a very large number of attempts before average returns are obtained. This puts smaller firms into a position of disproportionately high risk. Despite the earlier evidence that the rewards from innovation are positively skewed, we find no effect of innovation strategies upon the skewness of the distribution of firms’ profits.

Both managers and policy makers with responsibility for innovation at the firm and the country levels are interested in knowing the impact of pursuing different innovation strategies. A specific classification of innovation strategies that has received recent attention is the one that distinguishes between internal and external strategies. While it is well known that external sourcing and internal production are often used by firms in many areas of activity, the tendency for firms to use external sources of knowledge in their search for innovation is relatively recent (see Chesbrough, 2003) and a small but growing literature has started investigating the impact of these strategies upon innovation outcomes and performance (Cassiman and Veugelers, 2006 and Lokshin et al., 2008). This research has found that external R&D is productive in the sense that firms using external sources for their R&D strategies have better innovation outcomes, in particular if firms also undertake R&D in-house.

We investigated the impact of internal and external innovation strategies on the profitability of firms. We found that external strategies (contracting external R&D or cooperating with external partners in R&D projects) exert a positive impact upon performance. The estimated magnitude of this effect is greater than the estimated impact of conducting in-house R&D activities only and the former is clearly significant while the second is not.