The effect of legal environment on innovation performance of external knowledge strategies

Alexander, Elizabeth

Abstract

This study addresses how institutional differences across countries matter to firms by asking whether there is a best fit of collaborative strategy to improve firms’ innovation performance in a given institutional milieu: the legal institutional environment, i.e. procedural dimensions of contract enforcement (Djankov, La Porta, López-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 2003). Rapid technological change combined with increasingly complex technologies, as occurred in this setting of the cellular handset industry, provides firms incentives to collaborate to acquire new technologies, develop innovation, and achieve competitive advantage. Collaborative strategies, however, offer differing degrees of protection against the risk of appropriation and contract enforcement that are likely to vary across legal environments. Firms are more likely to use the courts for formal dispute resolution in countries with less bureaucratic and more adversarial legal systems (Kagan, 2003) and these firms are more likely to enter collaborative relationships underpinned by legal contracts (Hollingsworth & Streeck, 1994).

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management
• Start Date: Aug 1, 2008
• End Date: Aug 1, 2008
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Apr 30, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 21, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: national institutions, cooperative strategy
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1016545
• Publisher URL: http://meeting.aomonline.org/2008/
• Additional Information: Additional Information : Published as a CD. George T. Solomon (Ed.), Proceedings of the Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (CD), ISSN 1543-8643
• Contract Date: Feb 21, 2016