Abstract
This article examines how the choice of governance mode for external R&D, along with openness to new ideas and codifiability of knowledge, affects R&D performance. Superior R&D performance is therefore viewed as arising through (a) the choice of approaches used by the firm to access knowledge from outside (university partnering, alliance partnering, and contracting), (b) the knowledge context of the firm (its openness to new ideas and the codifiability of its knowledge assets), and (c) the interactions between these two sets of factors. These arguments are tested, and mostly supported, using data on the R&D activities of 107 large firms based in the United Kingdom and Sweden.