Outward Bound: Navigating Firms' Collaborative Innovation Strategies

This thesis examines collaborative innovation through three complementary analytical angles. The first chapter focuses on skills shortage as a key driver of innovation openness, showing how human capital constraints influence the breadth of firms' external collaborations and highlighting the tension between compensating for limited internal resources and maintaining sufficient internal expertise for effective knowledge absorption. The second chapter shifts attention to innovation diffusion, emphasizing how non-market stakeholders—particularly advocacy groups—help firms navigate barriers to market acceptance by providing stakeholder-centric knowledge and legitimacy. The third chapter analyzes industry-science collaboration, investigating how different interaction channels with academic institutions shape knowledge transfer, firms' ability to incorporate scientific insights, and the role of public support in strengthening these effects. Collectively, these perspectives offer a multidimensional view of the conditions, actors, and mechanisms that underpin collaborative innovation.