How to measure technological distance in collaborations? The case of electric mobility

Innovation collaborations experienced a substantial growth during the last decades, so that the research interest in factors contributing to successful collaboration increased. An appropriate technological distance, which determines the probability of receiving new knowledge from a partner as well as the ability of absorbing it, appears to be one of the success factors. The methodology for measuring this distance received massive attention in the latest literature. Therefore, we compare well established measuring methods with the recently introduced method of the min-complement distance. We focus on selected electric mobility collaborations between the chemical and automobile industry as they represent an emerging research field that aims to overcome deficiencies associated with battery development for electric mobility. Considering findings for intra-industry collaborations that show diminishing effects on innovation outcomes after exceeding a certain technological distance leads to questions concerning the success of such cross-industry collaborations. We show that the methodology used influences the approximation of technological distance in the examined collaborations. The use of the min-complement distance seems to be reasonable. Therefore, our work contributes to a better understanding of measuring technological distance from a methodological point of view as well as to its meaning for cross-industry collaborations.