External Partnering and Innovation Objectives: The Moderating Effect of Industry

This study examines the effect of external partnering on innovation performance of emerging economy firms by considering different conditional factors. Firstly, the effect of innovative intent is examined to understand how the link between external partnering and innovation performance evolves. Secondly, the interaction effect between external partnering and innovative intention is further examined depending on the industry affiliation. This research argues that firms with less innovative intention leverage more from external partnering than firms with more innovative intention. Moreover, this research argues that the link between external partnering and innovative intent becomes positive for manufacturing firms and negative for service firms. Based on a dataset of 2370 firms from different industries in Turkey, this research finds support for the hypotheses.