Technology partnership portfolios and firm innovation performance: Further evidence

Firms may cooperate in R&D with various types of partners to boost their innovative performance. We model the optimal partnership portfolio breadth and empirically test the model on a panel of Dutch manufacturing firms. We confirm earlier evidence of a curvilinear relationship between breadth of R&D cooperation and a firm's innovation performance. Two firm-specific factors, firm size and R&D-intensity, moderate this relationship. Small and low R&D-intensive firms tend to benefit more from embarking on R&D cooperation compared to large and/or R&D-intensive counterparts, but such benefits also tend to reduce more quickly when the number of types of cooperation partners increases.