Locational and Internal Sources of Firm Competitive Advantage: Applying Porter’s Diamond Model at the Firm Level ALEXANDER EICKELPASCH, ANNA LEJPRAS, AND ANDREAS STEPHAN Jönköping International Business School Jönköping University JIBS Working Papers No. 2010-6 Locational and Internal Sources of Firm Competitive Advantage: Applying Porter’s Diamond Model at the Firm Level* Alexander Eickelpasch, DIW Berlin Anna Lejpras, DIW Berlin Andreas Stephan, Jönköping International Business School, DIW Berlin, Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies (CESIS), Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm July 2010 *We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of this project provided by the German Science Foundation (research grant STE 1687-1). We give our special thanks to Jörg Henseler, Peter Nijkamp, and Charlie Karlsson for their helpful comments and suggestions on a previous version of the paper. We gratefully acknowledge the suggestions and comments by the attendees of the 10th Uddevalla Symposium, the 47th Congress of ERSA, the “Fostering Innovations and Transfer of Knowledge in Regions” conference in Warsaw, and the seminars at Jönköping International Business School, University of Groningen, University of Technology Darmstadt, University of Münster, and the Institute of Economics at the Polish Academy of Science. Corresponding author: Andreas Stephan, Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Box 1026, 551 11 Jönköping, Sweden (Email:
[email protected]). 2 Abstract This paper employs Porter’s diamond model to examine the relationships between a firm’s locational environment, its innovation capabilities, and competitive advantage assessed in terms of various performance indicators. This study implements a structural equation model that is estimated with the partial least squares (PLS) approach using a sample of 2,345 East German firms.