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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.
Audretsch et al. (2022) studied this question.