Complementarities in Performance between Product Innovation, Marketing Innovation and Cooperation with Clients

This paper examines the complementary relationship between product innovation, marketing innovation and cooperation with clients, based on data from Estonian firms. The author evaluated complementary relationship in terms of its effect on the firm's total factor productivity. This study uses the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) and Estonian Business Register data from the years 2002–2012 and the Heckman selection model to research the complementarity effect between studied innovation activities using the supermodularity approach. The results show that product innovation and marketing innovation are complementary in the service industry, but in manufacturing industry there is lack of evidence for the effect of complementarity. Cooperation with clients showed inconclusive complementarity test results involving both innovation types in both industries. Using panel data as a robustness test showed more insights into the complementary effects between cooperation with clients and the studied forms of innovation. However, the results show a weak complementarity effect between cooperation and innovation and suggest that there is still no clear complementarity effect