Assessing the Relationship between Firm Collaboration, Trade Publications, Patent Publications and Firm Innovation Performance: Knowledge Production Function Perspective

Abstract

Current studies acknowledge that firms' knowledge sources spur innovation performance and economic growth in emerging European economies. A study on which firms' knowledge sources and the context in which the sourced knowledge impacts firm innovation performance is under-explored. Our study draws on the axioms of the knowledge production function, the logistic regression method, the two-stage least square robust method and data from the Community Innovation Survey 2018 to analyse the relationship between firm knowledge sources (firm collaboration, patent publication and trade publication) and innovation performance moderated by government funding. For our study, we sampled 89605 micro and medium firms, mainly from emerging European economies. We found that (i) trade and patent publications positively and significantly impact product and process innovations, but the effect is stronger on process innovation compared to product innovation; (ii) intellectual property acquisition from universities negatively impacts product and process innovations in the average countries, but the effect was positive for economically limited countries; (iii) government funding positively and significantly moderates the impact of firm general collaboration on intellectual property and innovation performance. The moderation effect was more substantial in economically limited countries than in economically averaged countries for product and process innovations. We further discussed implications for practice, theory, and policy.