Open Innovation and Firm's Survival: An empirical investigation by using a linked dataset of patent and enterprise census

This paper uses patent filings as an indicator of innovation and investigates the relationship between innovation and firms' survival, based on the linked dataset of the Census of Establishment and Enterprise and the Institute of Intellectual Property (IIP) Patent Database for Japanese firms. We have constructed the indicators on the organization of innovative activities, such as external collaboration in inventions and the type of collaborative partners, and disentangle two competing factors, i.e., technological capability (positive influence on firms' survival) and commercial risk (negative influence on firms' survival). We found that the risk factor surpasses the capability factor, thus the impact of patenting on survival has a negative correlation with firms' survival at the end.