External Collaboration on Corporate Entrepreneurial Innovation

The present paper empirically tests the effect which internal/external collaboration has on innovation height and identifies characteristics of collaboration patterns leading to entrepreneurial innovation in particular. Doing so adds to the understanding of how corporate entrepreneurship best unfolds as interfirm activity, which here is termed collaborative entrepreneurship, and provides details on the particular patterns of Open Innovation. The empirical analysis is based on a data set with responses from 512 Danish engineers. The analysis finds that external collaboration has significantly different effects on innovation height depending on the type of partners involved, and furthermore suggests that the development of entrepreneurial innovation is not only dependent on high external involvement, but also on involvement and collaboration among internal functional departments and people.