How do external search strategies develop marketing and technological capabilities? Discussing its implications for innovation

Innovation is essential for organizations, but also a complex and risky process. Marketing and technological capabilities have been argued to be necessary to achieve innovation; however, a better understanding is needed about how to develop these capabilities. In this paper we explore associations between firms' intense collaborations with different types of external partners and the development of market and technological capabilities. We conduct a comparative study on a sample of 467 Spanish firms belonging to industries with different technological intensities. This study provides an important contribution to the literature on open innovation and also includes practical implications for managers that encourage collaboration with different types of external agents for developing technological and marketing capabilities.