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Small Firms and Search Strategies to Access External Knowledge from Universities: An Empirical Approach in Low-Tech Firms

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Production Systems and Supply Chain Management in Emerging Countries: Best Practices

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Abstract

A firm’s search strategies are innovation inputs from external sources of knowledge. For this matter, a firm needs to be capable of identifying and valuing the potential value of certain external knowledge, i.e. absorptive capacity. In low-tech sectors the flows of external knowledge arising from universities is still inconclusive, specifically for SMEs and low-medium-tech environments. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to explore the pattern of a firm’s search strategy through its absorptive capacity to acquire external flows of knowledge from universities and thus improve its knowledge platform to achieve more efficiency. The paper draws especially on the role of non-R&D innovation activities in low-medium-tech sectors. A logit model is used to estimate the contribution of each variable to the probability that a firm engages in cooperation with universities. Results from 442 firms suggest that human resources and other non-R&D activities are the core drivers explaining the cooperation agreements to access external knowledge from universities. Surprisingly, R&D expenditures do not contribute to the explanation, meaning that R&D efforts are not the core drivers of a firm’s search strategy to innovate.

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Acknowledgments

Dr. Hervas-Oliver gratefully thanks the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) for financial support under grant project ECO:2010–17318 “Innovation and Clusters through Absorptive Capacity,” and the Institut Ignaci Villalonga (Valencia) for continuous support and funding. Standard disclaimers apply.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIN, Department of Management (DOE), Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and Florida State University (U.S.), Campus vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain

    Jose-Luis Hervas-Oliver

  2. MIN, Department of Management (DOE), Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Joan-Josep Baixauli

  3. Universidad Politecnica Valencia DOE, Business Organization, Campus vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain

    Bernardo Perez (Visiting professor)

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  1. Jose-Luis Hervas-Oliver
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  1. , Dept. of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de los Andes, Carrera 1, Bogotá, 19A-40, Colombia

    Gonzalo Mejía

  2. , Dept. of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de los Andes, Carrera 1, Bogota, 19A-40, Colombia

    Nubia Velasco

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Hervas-Oliver, JL., Baixauli, JJ., Perez, B. (2012). Small Firms and Search Strategies to Access External Knowledge from Universities: An Empirical Approach in Low-Tech Firms. In: Mejía, G., Velasco, N. (eds) Production Systems and Supply Chain Management in Emerging Countries: Best Practices. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-26004-9_13

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