Exploring the relation between the degree of novelty of innovations and user-producer interaction across different income regions

User–producer interactions have been recognized as important for innovation. With the rapid growth of emerging economies’ markets, and an increasing degree of technological sophistication of both users and producers in those markets, user–producer interaction is becoming global. Using original firm-level data, this paper explores how collaboration with users in different income regions affects the degree of innovations’ novelty. We find that collaborating with international users is positively related to higher degrees of novelty. Furthermore, firms in low- and middle income countries will benefit more from south–south user collaboration than a south–north one.