Abstract
This paper discusses how and why firms fail to innovate through collaboration. Faced with highly fluctuating environments, firms increasingly rely on R&D collaboration to produce multiple innovations in sequence. However, as some scholars have pointed out, a lot of collaborations fail to invent technological breakthroughs, or fail to commercialize it. Despite increasing attention about this tendency, most of prior research have only enumerated success factors of collaborative technological development, so firms’ internal processes needed to commercialize are not discussed until now. The result of quantitative analysis using a questionnaire survey conducted for the collaborative R&D projects supported by NEDO (N=128) and follow-up case studies uncover two points. First, to innovate through collaboration, innovators have to (1) acquire technological outcome by communicating with other organizations, and (2) acquire legitimacy for launch by communicating with other internal divisions. Second, because of innovators’ autonomy-coordination dilemma, these two directional communications fall into a trade-off relationship. This second point suggests the fundamental reason many firms fail to innovate through collaborations.
