Impacts of Cooperative R&D on Participating Firms

在过去的二十年中，工业企业越来越多地参与和依赖与竞争对手、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。&这些伙伴关系或合作安排的达成，是期望它们有助于控制研发费用的上升，避免不必要的重复努力，利用联合努力的规模经济，或为参与公司带来它们不具备的、昂贵或不可行的能力。&尽管为这些伙伴关系投入了大量资源和战略精力，但人们对它们在实现目标方面的效力知之甚少。至于这些安排对参与者的其他影响，无论是积极的还是消极的，我们就更不清楚了。这项调查的主要重点将是企业，因为有大量的文献与工业合作对学术机构的影响，以及联邦实验室对工业的影响，以及大量的，但不加批判的文献颂扬的优点，研发合作在一般情况下，以及在特定的情况下。&该试验项目将进行文献审查、访谈、案例研究和数据源识别，以开始识别、评估和理解企业之间和企业对研发合作的关键影响的性质。&我们的目标是检查即时和延迟效应。拟议的工作的一个基本特点是竞争对手之间的研发伙伴关系和那些涉及两个或两个以上的公司，有互补的优势，以促进之间的比较。&该项目将采访10至20名工业研发领导人，以完善初步假设，并通过2至4个公司或合作伙伴的案例研究来验证这些假设。&将编制一份财团名单，为对已知参与研发伙伴关系的几百家公司进行详细调查提供依据。&将主要在纵向和横向伙伴关系的公司之间进行比较，而不是在参与和不参与研发伙伴关系的公司之间进行比较。&本试点和任何后续研究的结果不仅对考虑研发合作伙伴关系的工业研发管理者有用，而且对许多已成为研发合作倡导者和支持者的政府政策制定者和研发项目管理者也有用。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.