The impact of inter-firm collaborations by researchers on innovation in biotechnology firms

A focus of current research in strategic management has been on formal strategic alliances and their role in inter-firm learning. We suggest that collaborations across firm boundaries at the individual level can also positively enhance a firm's knowledge base and hence innovativeness. Our paper focuses on the role of inter-firm collaborations by biotechnology researchers and their impact on the patented innovative output of firms. We find that after controlling for other factors that affect innovative output, the total number of individual collaborations (aggregated at the firm level) positively impacts the patenting output of stand-alone biotechnology firms. We also find that the impact of these informal collaborations on firm innovativeness decreases with age and size of the firm.