No Strings Attached: When do Firms Benefit from Loosely Coupled Research Partnerships?

We examine whether, when and why accessing external knowledge via loosely coupled research partnerships, which predominantly rely on an exchange of knowledge for money (e.g. licensing, R&D contracting), may allow the in-sourcing firm to introduce substantially new products. While most researchers agree that tightly coupled partnerships, where partners intensively interact with one another (e.g. joint-ventures, co-development) can substantially help firms to innovate, the relationship between loosely coupled research partnerships and a firm’s innovative performance has generated mixed views and results. We argue that the innovation benefits from loosely coupled partnerships are contingent on the in-sourcing firm’s overall experimental orientation to pursue risky projects and its availability of financial slack and organizational resources. We test our hypotheses in the global pharmaceutical industry, using a panel dataset covering the world’s largest global pharmaceutical firms between 1998 and 2007 and find that under certain circumstances loosely coupled research partnerships may provide the same type of innovation benefits typically attributed only to tightly coupled partnerships.

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