Abstract
This research explores the linkages between the breadth and depth of search strategies and innovation performance from the perspective of emerging economy firms. The unique characteristics of such firms influence the success of search and they can leverage international collaboration to increase the benefits from their search strategies. This thesis contributes to the innovation search agenda by investigating search strategies by emerging economy firms and employing international collaboration as a contingency factor. This study first distinguishes international collaboration depending on the partners’ national contexts, i.e. collaboration with partners from emerging economies and collaboration with partners from developed economies, in order to examine its effects on the link between search strategies and innovation performance. Second, this research distinguishes international collaboration according to partner types, i.e. international market-based and science-based partners in order to investigate its effects on the link between search strategies and different types of innovation performance. The constructed model was tested using data drawn from the Turkish Innovation Survey, which included 659 innovative firms from 19 two digit-level manufacturing and service industries.The empirical results indicate that an emerging economy firm searching the external environment broadly and deeply is not likely to yield innovative products. It is, rather, the collaboration with international partners that enables these firms to increase their innovativeness. However, the results suggest that firms need to trade- off across search strategies depending on which national context they collaborate with. More specifically, firms fare better if they follow a search breadth strategy when they collaborate with partners from other emerging economies. In contrast, they perform better if they follow a search depth strategy when they collaborate with partners from developed economies. Moreover, the findings also point to the importance of international collaboration partner types for increasing the benefits of search strategies on different types of innovation performance. That is, the effect of search breadth strategy on radical innovation performance is enhanced with international market-based partners, not with science-based ones. In addition, the impact of search depth strategy on radical innovation performance is enhanced with international science-based partners, whereas its effect on incremental innovation performance is enhanced when collaborating with international market-based partners.
| Date of Award | 17 Nov 2015 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Michael Mayer (Supervisor) |