5 R&D Collaboration and Start-ups

Kapitel i bok, 2017

It is well known from previous studies that R&D collaboration is important to firms’ technological development, especially in business-to-business (B2B) markets. This includes empirical studies carried out in the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) tradition focusing on the role and importance of interaction, business relationships and industrial networks (e.g. Baraldi, 2003; Baraldi, Gressetvold, & Harrison, 2012; Gressetvold, 2004; Håkansson, 1987; Håkansson & Waluszewski, 2002, 2007; Laage-Hellman, 1997; Wedin, 2001) as well as other types of innovation studies (e.g. McKelvey, Zaring, & Ljungberg, 2015; Melander, 2014; von Hippel, 1988). Innovation thus tends to be the outcome of interaction processes between different types of actors including, for example, selling and buying firms.