Impacts of Cooperative R&D on Participating Firms

在过去的二十年里，工业企业越来越多地参与并依赖于涉及竞争对手、其他公司、学术机构、政府实验室和外国来源的研发伙伴关系。达成这些合作或合作安排的预期是，它们将有助于控制不断上升的研发成本，避免不必要的重复劳动，在联合努力中利用规模经济，或者将它们没有的、昂贵的或无法获得的一整套能力带入参与公司。尽管资源和战略精力对这些伙伴关系作出了巨大的承诺，但人们对它们在实现其目标方面的有效性知之甚少。更不知道这些安排对参与者有什么其他影响，无论是积极的还是消极的。这一调查的主要焦点将是企业，因为有大量关于与行业合作对学术机构的影响以及联邦实验室对行业的影响的文献，以及大量但不具批判性的文献，赞扬了研发合作的一般和具体情况的优点。该试点项目将进行文献回顾、访谈、案例研究和数据来源确定，以开始确定、评估和了解企业之间和企业之间研发合作的关键影响的性质。我们的目标是检查直接和延迟影响。拟议工作的一个基本特点是比较竞争对手之间的研发伙伴关系与涉及两家或两家以上优势互补的公司的研发伙伴关系。该项目将采访10到20名行业研发负责人，以完善最初的假设，并通过2到4个关于公司或合作伙伴的案例研究来检验这些假设。将编制一份财团名单，这些财团可以为对数百家已知从事研发合作的公司进行详细调查提供基础。这些比较将主要在纵向和横向合伙企业之间进行，而不是在参与和不参与研发合作的企业之间进行。这项试验和任何后续研究的结果都将对考虑研发伙伴关系的行业研发经理以及许多政府政策制定者和研发项目经理都有用，他们已经成为研发合作的倡导者和支持者，研发合作是确保国家未来的关键工具。

During the past two decades, industrial firms have become increasingly engaged in and dependent on R&D partnerships involving competitors, other firms, academic institutions, government laboratories, and foreign sources. These partnership, or cooperative, arrangements are entered into with the expectation that they will help control the rising costs of R&D, avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, take advantage of economies of scale in combined efforts, or bring into the participating firms sets of capabilities that they don't have and would be expensive or unfeasible to obtain. Despite the enormous commitment of resources and strategic energy to these partnerships, relatively little is known about how effective they are at accomplishing their goals. Even less is known about what other impacts, positive or negative, these arrangements have on the participants. The primary focus of this inquiry will be on firms, since there is a large literature on the impacts of cooperation with industry on academic institutions, and the impacts of federal laboratories on industry, as well as a large but uncritical literature extolling the virtues of R&D cooperation in general as well as in specific instances. This pilot project will undertake literature reviews, interviews, case studies, and data source identification to begin to identify, assess, and understand the nature of key impacts of R&D cooperation between and on firms. The goal is to examine both immediate and delayed effects. An essential feature of the proposed work is a comparison between R&D partnerships among competitors and those that involve two or more firms that have complementary strengths to contribute. The project will interview ten to 20 industrial R&D leaders to refine initial hypotheses, and test these with two to four case studies of firms or partnerships. A list of consortia that can provide the basis for a detailed survey to be addressed to several hundred firms known to be engaged in R&D partnerships will be compiled. The comparisons will be made primarily between firms in vertical and horizontal partnerships, rather than between firms that are and are not involved in R&D partnerships. It is intended that results from this pilot and any follow-on studies be useful both to industrial R&D managers considering R&D partnerships, as well as to the many government policy makers and R&D program managers who have become advocates for and supporters of R&D cooperation as a key tool in ensuring the nation's future.