CIECS   20730
CENTRO DE INVESTIGACIONES Y ESTUDIOS SOBRE CULTURA Y SOCIEDAD
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
capítulos de libros
Título:
Make or Buy to innovate in the Software sector
Autor/es:
MORERO, HERNÁN ALEJANDRO; ORTIZ, PABLO; WYSS, FEDERICO
Libro:
Sectores, Redes, Encadenamientos Productivos y Clúster de Empresas
Editorial:
Red Pymes
Referencias:
Año: 2014; p. 6 - 30
Resumen:
The economies of Latin America experienced a
profound economic growth in the last decade. In that context, it is important
to analyze the extent that emerging catching up processes in high tech sectors,
as for example Knowledge Intensive Business Services
(KIBS), opens a way to a virtuous developing path.
The software and IT services is one of the more important KIBS. Besides that the leaders of the sector have remained in the
developed world, over the 1990s many developing countries have catch up and
gained a competitive position among the main global actors[1].
Brazil and Argentina, following the Asian model, have recognized the importance
of intangible goods - such as software and services in general - for their
potential of direct economic impact. Therefore, policy makers and scholars in
the region have become interested in the innovation process in the software
industry.
Nowadays, the understanding of the innovation process implies the
recognition that firms do not innovate in isolation but there are external
influences by mean of complementary information and knowledge that may become
key drivers of firms? performance. Closed innovation views has been losing
effectiveness due to a series of aspects (the reduction of the innovations life
cycle, the innovation-based competition, etc.), enlarging the necessity of
firms to expand their access to new knowledge. The new models of innovation
explain the predominance of open firms? strategies that leads to the study of
complementarity, underlining the fact that this is a context-specific
aspect (A. Arora,
Gambardella, & Torrisi, 2004; Cassiman & Veugelers, 2006; Chesbrough, 2003; Laursen & Salter, 2006;
Mohnen & Röller, 2005). Successful
innovation in firms depends upon the development and integration of new
knowledge into the innovation process though diverse innovative activities,
internal and external to the firm (Cassiman
& Veugelers, 2002).
With this background, it became more and more important to establish
if these activities are complementaries or substitutes related to the innovation
performance of the firm, to approach a better understanding of the nature of
innovation processes in diverse production activities. Moreover, the empirical
research has been focused on manufacturing sectors. However, the economic
literature on services point out that the characteristics of the innovation
process is essentially different in this kind of economic activity (Drejer, 2004).
Innovation studies on services tends to point out
that there are specific aspects on the nature itself of production in these
sectors that particularize its innovation processes (Drejer, 2004; Gallouj & Savona, 2009): immateriality, co-production and a profound
interactivity with external actors. Software production is a complex activity that involves an essentially
creative-stage ?development? which in turn involves conceptualization,
requirements analysis and high-level design. Less creative activities are
low-level coding design, testing and technical support, which are sometimes
outsourced by development firms. On the other hand, software services involve
fully customized solutions, and other routinized ones. They involve
implementation and customization of third party products, consulting, training,
and tasks associated with installation, operation and maintenance of software.
In any case, software activities seem to imply certain combination of internal
and external knowledge sources. That allows to
hypothesize that a complementarity relation could arise between internal and
external innovative activities, which is the main working hypothesis of the
paper.
As the nature of innovation differs in these sectors, there are also
reasons to consider that complementarities between innovative activities could
differ in this type of sectors, mostly on KIBS. The objective of this paper is
to evaluate the existence of complementarity between internal and external
sources of knowledge in relation to innovation results, in a KIBS sector from
an emerging economy: the software and IT services case from Argentina. The paper intends to be a first step to further ongoing
research on the degree that complementarity relations between innovation
activities are influenced by diverse characteristics of the firms and
contextual aspects.
In this paper, we will follow the empirical rigorous method
presented by Cassiman and
Veugelers (2006) to test the existence of complementarity in the innovation
strategies of Argentinean firms from the software sector. It intends to be a
first step to further ongoing research on the degree that complementarity
relations between innovation activities are influenced by diverse
characteristics of the firms and contextual aspects.
The paper is structured as follows: In
section two, we present the
theoretical background that frames the hypotheses development. In section
three, we present the methodology and the description of thedata, the construction of the indicatorsand the econometrical methods used.
Section four discusses the mainres