**6. Conclusions**

The study carried out by us was aimed at exploring the impact of knowledge spillover effects on the innovative activity of industrial companies in Russia. Special attention was paid to which characteristics of a company contributed to knowledge accumulation and stimulated an increase in innovation activity.

The obtained results allow drawing conclusions about the positive impact of knowledge spillover effects stemming from the companies' export activities. "New" exporting companies, unlike "permanent" exporters, do not have visible links between implementation of new products, technologies, and the start of exports. The coefficients themselves and the probabilities of the innovation behavior under

study being exhibited are much lower than for similar traditional exporters. This can be explained by the fact that R&D investments that might have been initiated after or at the time of entry in a foreign market have not yet yielded results. The status of "traditional" exporters increases the probability of investments in advanced research and development by 38%.

We obtained evidence that exporting firms increasingly begin to introduce technological, process and marketing innovations, which previously were not included in the firm's plans, much more frequently compared to non-exporting firms.

It should be emphasized that the impact of external knowledge effects on the productivity of industrial companies depends on the geographical destination of exports: thus, companies exporting to CIS countries operate in the domestic market. Therefore, the effects of learning by exporting to CIS countries are much weaker, whereas for companies exporting to non-CIS countries, learning is much more characteristic. This conclusion is in line with the study [15], which shows that productivity growth is more characteristic for firms operating in industrially developed countries.

Another conclusion is that investments in R&D, marketing, and release of new products are more characteristic for companies located in metropolitan regions (at a significance level of 1%).

It should be noted that we did not find any significant dependence between the availability of an international office and implementation of innovations. This fact is in line with other studies showing that competition conditions are more significant for the firms' innovation behavior than the form of ownership. The companies' size (based on the logarithm of the number of employees) only had an impact on the production of new technologies: if a company belongs to medium-sized enterprises or is larger, the probability of inventing innovations increases by 22% (at the significance level of 1%).

The derived conclusions are generally in line with most of advanced foreign works on the topic in question.

Thus, the impact of learning spillover effects of knowledge is manifested in organizations as a result of a change in their innovation behavior: the longer a company operates in foreign markets, i.e., the longer the learning process, the flow of knowledge, the more pronounced the transformation of the firm's innovation behavior (changes in business processes, increase in the creativity and skills of employees (IT specialists), a change in the business model, and other indicators). Knowledge spillover effects enable companies to ensure payback of investments in exports and innovations on a regular basis solely through the continuous inflow of complementary knowledge and experience from international partners. However, in some cases such openness can increase the risk of loss of independence and the possibility of being taken over.

Our study has a number of limitations. Overcoming these limitations predetermines the direction of its further development. The survey sample was conditioned by the possibility of collecting data; therefore, the model should be tested additionally on a larger sample embracing more Russian regions. Some indicators in the model can be reformulated; new factors, whose analysis would make it possible to increase the model's explanatory power, can be incorporated in the model.

**15**

**Author details**

provided the original work is properly cited.

Arkady Trachuk\* and Natalia Linder

Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia

\*Address all correspondence to: atrachuk@fa.ru

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

Department of Management, Financial University under the Government of the

*Knowledge Spillover Effects: Impact of Export Learning Effects on Companies' Innovative…*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86255*
