Creative Destruction in the Era of Open Innovation: Empirical investigation into the relationship between patenting and survival of Japanese firms

This paper uses patent filings as an indicator of innovation and investigates the relationship between innovation and the survival of young firms, based on a dataset linking the Economic Census and the Institute of Intellectual Property (IIP) Patent Database for Japanese firms. We construct indicators showing the organization of innovative activities, such as external collaboration on inventions and the type of collaborative partners, and disentangle two competing factors on innovative activities, i.e., technological capability (positive influencing firm survival) and commercial risk (negative influencing firm survival). We find that positive impacts surpass negative ones in general, and this tendency strengthens when patents have relatively greater potential market value. In addition, collaboration with universities invariably leads to a higher probability of survival, while the impact of collaboration with other firms depends on firm size, namely, a certain level of managerial resources to overcome the complexity involved in open innovation is required to achieve gains from collaboration.