Reaching Out and Reaching Within: A Study of the Relationship between Innovation Collaboration and Innovation Performance

A large body of research has thoroughly discussed and examined agglomeration advantages for innovation of geographically concentrated firms. However, there is an increasing awareness that this intellectual tradition tends to overemphasize the role of geographic proximity in the transfer of knowledge between firms and to under-theorize the contribution of nonlocal knowledge flows. With a sample of 143 manufacturing firms from Singapore, this research attempts to answer three interrelated questions: (1) Does local networking effort provide firms with added value above and beyond what is available to them by just “being there?” (2) Does local collaboration contribute more to innovation performance than nonlocal collaboration? (3) What is the joint impact of local and nonlocal collaborations on innovation performance? We find that while local and nonlocal collaborations are statistically indistinguishable from each other in terms of their relative importance, they represent complementary spurs to innovation. Despite the unique research setting of Singapore as a city state, we argue that our findings may be generalizable to geographic systems in other parts of the world.