Absorptive capacity and innovation: when is it better to cooperate?

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate? And, once the decision to cooperate is made, how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external knowledge. Absorptive capacity of firms develops as an outcome of the interaction between absorptive R&D and cognitive distance from voluntary and involuntary knowledge spillovers. Thus, we offer a revision of the original model by Cohen and Levinthal (Econ J 99(397):569–596, 1989), accounting for recent empirical findings and explicitly modeling absorptive capacity within the framework of interactive learning. We apply that to the analysis of firms’ cooperation and R&D investment preferences. The results show that cognitive distance and appropriability conditions between a firm and its cooperation partner have an ambiguous effect on the profit generated by the firm. Thus, a firm chooses to cooperate and selects a partner conditional on the investments in absorptive capacity it is willing to make to solve the understandability/novelty trade-off.