Antecedents of innovation impacts in publicly funded collaborative R&D projects

• We investigate antecedents of innovation from publicly funded collaborative R&D projects.
• Innovation in terms of product, process, and inimitability of the resulting technology.
• Hypotheses concern the impacts of project and firm-specific factors on innovation.
• We utilize survey responses from firms having participated in the EU Framework Programmes.
• Firms derive impacts conditional on superior capabilities and the nature of the project itself.

This study investigates antecedents of innovation impacts derived by firms participating in publicly funded collaborative R&D projects. Innovation impacts are reflected in product and process innovation, and inimitability of the resulting technology. Project and firm-specific factors are considered. The dataset for our analysis is based on survey responses from 694 firms collected through an extensive data collection effort of pan-European scale. The general picture emerging from our results is that firms engaging in such projects can gain in terms of innovation, conditional on their superior in-house capabilities and the nature of the project itself.