Impacts of Cooperative R&D on Participating Firms

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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.