On September 13th, 2019, Damián Tojeiro-Rivero defended his doctoral thesis titled "R&D offshoring and firm's innovativeness: The role of firms', regional, and sectoral characteristics” supervised by Dr. Rosina Moreno Serrano.

The doctoral committee was composed of Dr. José García Quevedo (Universitat de Barcelona), Dr. Lorena M. D’Agostino (University of Milan-Bicocca) and Dr. Mercedes Teruel Carrizosa (University Rovira i Virgili) who decided to grade the PhD thesis with an “Excellent Cum Laude”.

This doctoral thesis studies R&D offshoring and firms’ innovative performance, and how the environments in which enterprises are located (regional) and within which firms operate (sectoral) might affect this relationship. The first empirical chapter explores R&D offshoring’s role in the commercial success of radical product innovations, paying special attention to the technological type of agents, as well as to the phase of the economic cycle. In the second empirical chapter I hypothesize that the transformation of firms’ networking activities into innovation may vary depending on the regional environment in which the firm is located. Finally, the last empirical chapter argue that R&D offshoring is not just a matter of firm’s decision as in previous literature, but also has an important industrial level component, pointing to a social benefit of R&D offshoring for certain sectors.