The influence of stakeholders' specific assets investment on opportunistic behavior in cooperative innovation

Cooperative innovation has become an important mode of technological innovation and achieved success. However, in practice the failure rate is about 50% of collaborative innovation, 75% of product innovation and the success rate is less than 20% in innovation transformation. Most people believe that stakeholders' opportunistic behavior is the root cause, but they are not clear about its intrinsic mechanism. Based on stakeholder theory, this paper analyzes opportunistic behavior of some main stakeholders (such as suppliers, customers, and scientific research institutes) of a core enterprise from the perspectives of resource and capability to specific assets investments and Interest-Power symmetry of its stakeholders. It shows that both the kinds of specific assets investment have positive influence on opportunistic behavior, but the latter's is greater than the former's. When stakeholders' Interest-Power asymmetry happens, the former is more likely to be in "lack of power", and the latter is more prone to be in "lack of interest", which lead to different influence on the opportunistic behavior. Therefore, the core enterprise should pay attention to the stakeholders' heterogeneous specific assets investments and their Interest-Power symmetry, actively prevent and control the stakeholders' opportunistic behavior to improve the achievement of cooperative innovation.