El próximo Seminario del Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos (IPP-CSIC) tendrá lugar el el jueves 23 de junio a las 12:00 h. en la Sala María Zambrano (0C9). 

En esta ocasión, se presentará la ponencia "The Role of Public External Knowledge for Firm Innovativeness", a cargo de Óscar Vicente Chirivella (Universidad de Valencia)

Abstract

Public Research Institutes (PRIs) and universities receive large amounts of public funds for the generation and transmission of knowledge and companies extract external knowledge from both of them. An important question for a firm's management of its R&D is what is more beneficial to generate innovations, external knowledge created by PRIs or by universities? In this paper, we assess the differential impact of external knowledge from PRIs versus external knowledge from universities on firm innovatives. We use information of R&D acquisition from a panel dataset of more than 10000 Spanish firms from 2005 to 2014. Using a difference-in-difference estimator, we show that external knowledge from both organizations increase firm innovativeness. Our results suggest that the knowledge generated by PRIs is more sensitive to the absorptive capacities of the firm than the knowledge generated by universities. This has implications for the management of R&D and organizational strategies of the knowledge activities of firms. Firms that obtain external knowledge from universities might not have incentives to invest in their internal R&D. In contrast, R&D managers might plan both their external and internal R&D if they acquire external R&D from PRIs.