What affects parent companies’ innovation more in joint venture relationships?

Forming joint ventures with potential partners in acquiring the needed resources and technology provides benefits and creates competitive advantage and innovation for multinational enterprises. While cooperative partners can provide JVs with various resources and technologies, allocation of the position of organizational resources remains unclear and needs to be further addressed. The main purpose of the current paper is to emphasize organizational slack resources (e.g., available slack and potential slack) to illuminate the settings that facilitate the effects of investment attractiveness and employee involvement on JV innovation performance. To demonstrate the real industry of JVs and examine the research purpose, we used various databases, including the National Bureau of Economic Research U.S. patent data file, Harvard DVN patent database, Compustat database and SDC global joint ventures databank to examine the hypotheses. The results show the positive and significant direct effects of investment attractiveness and employee involvement on JV innovation performance. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that the above direct effects are more pronounced when there is higher available slack and potential slack. The current study contributes by offering new viewpoints on JV, offering new understandings of organizational slack and developing an uncharted bridge between the types of slack and JV innovation studies.