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.