Die Wirkung innovationsorientierter Kooperationsnetzwerke auf den Innovationserfolg - Eine empirische Untersuchung auf Basis des Competence-Based View und des Relational View

Growing international competition and the high market dynamism mean companies in many industries can only improve or safeguard their profitability and market share by launching innovative products, at the same time focusing their strength and continuing to specialize. However, the race to innovate poses increasing technological challenges: ever greater technology complexity and convergence, swifter development times, and shorter product cycles. Companies with a long-term perspective that recognize their latent and/or manifest resource and competence deficits meet these challenges by forging links with external sources of know-how and skills.Forming strategic alliances of this kind provides access to supplementary technological skills and know-how. This has two key benefits. One is the potential to generate new products by combining internal and external resources. Second, the cooperative learning processes can close resource and competence gaps that open up in the course of a company's innovation activities. Many firms are aware of the positive impact of such alliances. Companies can create a broad, diversified resource pool by cooperating with customers, suppliers, research institutes and other enterprises from their own or other industries. The question is no longer whether but how to leverage this cooperation to achieve a competitive edge in development and marketing. This dissertation analyzes both the innovation potential of innovation-oriented cooperation networks and the prerequisites for designing them to capture this potential.Based on existing empirical analyses the Core Competence-Based View and the Relational View we propose a multidimensional model that maps the impact of cooperation networks on a company's innovation success along three dimensions: the organizational circumstances of the different partners, their cooperation skills, and their absorptive competence. We confirmed these (theoretically derived) assumptions by conducting a cross-industry survey of 5,000 companies with revenues of between EUR 50 - 300 million. We found that factoring in organizational complementarities and compatibilities when selecting alliance partners, building an absorptive competence superior to those of competitors, greatly enhances the impact of cooperation networks on innovation success, particularly for SMEs.