%0 Journal Article
%A García Vega, María
%A Huergo Orejas, Elena
%T The role of international and domestic R&D outsourcing for firm innovation
%D 2019
%@ 0167-2681
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/12335
%X Firms are increasingly outsourcing their high-tech services. Theory suggests that R&D outsourcing allows firms to specialize in core knowledge-intensive tasks, thereby increasing innovation, but R&D outsourcing may also undermine internal capabilities. Our goal is to empirically assess the relative importance of these two possibilities, distinguishing between national and international R&D outsourcing and firms’ exporting status. We examine R&D purchases of more than 10,000 Spanish firms for the period 2004-2014. We show that R&D outsourcing improves firm innovation. Product innovation rises mostly with domestic outsourcing, while process innovation increases with both domestic and international R&D outsourcing. In addition, we find that international outsourcing provides an extra premium, mostly for exporters. Our results contribute to a better understanding of how firms organize the production of knowledge and innovation.
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