Technological opportunities and innovation performance: evidence from Polish manufacturing firms

Technological opportunity is a concept that is attracting attention from scholars and practitioners in the fields of economics and the management of innovation. In general, technological opportunities refer to the contribution of external knowledge to the innovation activities of firms in a given industry. Although the role of external knowledge has been discussed in detail in the open innovation literature, there is still a challenge: how to operationalize technological opportunities and measure their impact on firms' innovation performance. In order to reduce this gap in the literature, our study aims at analysing the effects of technological opportunities on the output of the innovation process. Our empirical research is based on micro-data from the Polish Community Innovation Survey. The sample consists of 1979 manufacturing firms. We use the linear regression to estimate the relationship in which the share of innovative product sale is a function of a set of technological opportunity variables. These variables refer to two distinct measures of technological opportunities, i.e. the contribution of external knowledge to innovation activity and the propensity to collaboration on innovation. Our results show that inter-firm differences in technological opportunities explain inter-firm variation in innovation outcome. Moreover, we do not find any moderating impact from the absorptive capacity on the relationship between technological opportunities and innovation performance.