Collaboration for innovation and project failure. A dynamic analysis

The aim of this paper is to investigate the hypothesis that there is a
complex and bidirectional relation between collaboration and failure in
innovation projects. On the one hand, collaboration in innovative
activities may increase the likelihood of project failure. At the same time,
the failure in innovation projects may induce the firm to collaborate in
order to overcome the problems that determined the failure of
innovation projects (induced collaboration). Up to now, we are not aware
about the existence of any empirical paper analysing the interaction
between these two mechanisms. This paper aims at filling this gap by
providing a motivation for the induced collaboration and testing its
empirical relevance in a dynamic framework. The empirical analysis is
carried out by using two consecutive German Community Innovation
Surveys referring to the period 2006–2010. The empirical results support
the hypothesis of a bidirectional causal relationship between
collaboration and failure.