Abstract

As the strategic alliance between firms is becoming increasingly popular, and collaborative innovation is becoming an important management issue, the lack of a holistic framework of different collaborative partners’ characteristics and their different effects on firms’ innovation is becoming a critical research gap. Another intension of our study is to explore the moderating factors that affect the market dissimilarity/technology complementarity—innovation performance relationships. Using the data of collaboration between innovative firms, we tested our hypotheses using partial least squares (PLS). The results show that both market dissimilarity and technology complementarity between collaborative partners relate positively to focal firms’ innovation performance, in terms of both novelty and efficiency, while technology complementarity is more effective. Our results also indicate that IT adoption negatively moderates the relationship between market dissimilarity and collaborative innovation novelty/efficiency, and the relationship between technology complementarity and innovation efficiency, while in terms of the relationship between technology complementarity and innovation novelty, the moderating effect becomes significantly positive. This study extends previous research on collaborative innovation.