This paper contributes to the debate on the differences across service and manufacturing firms focusing on two comparable sectors: knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and specialized manufacturing suppliers (SSM) and looking at what drives their innovation performance.
Our findings show that the impact of R&D is comparable in the two sectors, whereas cooperation with customers is more important for SSM than for KIBS because the latter are rather more reliant on a larger network of partners (especially knowledge providers). For both sectors, the role of cooperation vanishes when performance is measured in terms of the proportion of sales generated by innovation rather than propensity for innovation.
For more info: R.(2020) Do knowledge-intensive business services innovate differently?, Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 29:1, 48-65