Importance Of Interfirm Relations In Austria

INTER-FIRM RELATIONSHIP:

With the term interfirm relationship we define the relations of a company with other enterprise, its supplier or clients, with a view to securing a stable demand for its product, appropriate supplies of inputs and access to technology (Hall, Soskice, 2001 : 24).
In Austria since the 70’s it is possible to discover an increase in the cooperations among firms and with several forms: the rapid expansion in the global market connected with an increase in the competition required a raise in the demand for knowledge exchange; in this period network relations between firms become more and more and important than before (Schibany, 1998). Collaborative relationship increased also sector by sector in the following years: Coombs

After we will discuss the effect on the technlogy transfer and consequences on innovation.

Austrian’s company seems to cooperate for product innovation, infact 62% of firms that had one or more product innovation had cooperated with other firms while only the 38% did not (Schibany, 1998). Even if it seems that the amount of cooperation increase with an increase in the firm size the differences between the maximum and the minimum is only of 22% (70,4 % for the biggest, 48,5 % for the smaller): From this data the cooperations appears not so related to the firm size as finding a partner for cooperation is not so difficult even if is difficult to access to the resources necessaries for the smaller ones.
Regarding sector the higher grade of cooperations is observed in the chemical sectors (81%, mainly because many Austrian’s chemical firms are subsidiaries of foreign firms), in motor veichles and in machinery (Schibany,

Inter firm relations are supposed to reflect the efficiency and effectiveness in producing, diffusing and exploiting economically useful knowledge (Schibany, 1998 : 5); from this perspective R&D expenditures is not the only way to promote innovation as “learning in connection with routine activities may be more important that R&D” (Lundvall,1992). The evidence is that Austria is a net importer of technology beacuse according to OECD data from 1998 Austria spends a litlle on R&D (negative value of the trade balance of payments –