The knowledge spillover of innovation

Abstract This study advances our understanding of knowledge spillover of innovation, putting a firm’s own R&D investment and knowledge spillovers to a competitive test. We use three matched databases of 15,430 firms in the United Kingdom (UK) during the period 2002–2014 in order to demonstrate that knowledge spillovers emanating from R&D investment within and between industries have different effects on innovation compared to imitation and that the ability to access spillover is conditional on the firm’s own investment in R&D. This study furthers our understanding in two different ways. Firstly, it supports the two faces of the R&D story. Second, it demonstrates that the relationship between knowledge spillover and firm innovation depends on the firm’s own investment in R&D and reveals the positive effects of knowledge transfer as well as factors limiting the use of spillovers such as industry competition, transaction costs, and eventually innovation type.