Inter-organizational cooperation and organizational innovativeness: Is collaborative community the answer?

This explorative study investigates the relationship between inter-organizational cooperation and organizational innovativeness within an explorative study. In this respect, several scholars have argued that the trust-based collaborative community is and appropriate form of cooperation for dealing with complex, knowledge-intensive assets. The notion of trust in capitalism, however, causes theoretical contradictions. This paper tries to overcome these by synthesizing constructs from classical organization theory within a trustful context. Next to this, the trust thesis is tested. In addition, this paper tries to provide answers to the question of how inter-organizational cooperation influences organizational innovativeness by building a comprehensive framework of inter-organizational cooperation. Both the trust thesis and framework are tested by using an experimental vignette design. The results from the multilevel analysis indicate that trust is the most significant dimension within inter-organizational cooperation that positively influences organizational innovativeness. In addition, the results suggest that the more inter-organizational cooperation approaches the collaborative community form, the greater its positive influence on innovativeness. Yet, when the trust dimension is fulfilled, the findings show little difference in terms of innovation outcomes between partnership types. Since this study was merely explorative, more research is needed in order to investigate if, and how, different dimensions of inter-organizational cooperation interact.