Impacts of Cooperative R&D on Participating Firms

在过去的二十年里，工业公司越来越多地参与并依赖于包括竞争对手、其他公司、学术机构、政府实验室和外国资源在内的研发伙伴关系。这些伙伴关系或合作安排是期望它们有助于控制不断上升的研发成本，避免不必要的重复努力，利用联合努力的规模经济，或为参与公司带来他们没有的、昂贵的或不可获得的能力。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有效性知之甚少。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，人们就更不知道了。这项调查的主要焦点将是公司，因为有大量的文献关于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，以及大量但不加批判的文献颂扬研发合作的优点，无论是在一般情况下还是在具体情况下。这个试点项目将进行文献综述、访谈、案例研究和数据源识别，以开始识别、评估和理解公司之间和对公司的研发合作的关键影响的性质。目的是检查即时和延迟的影响。所建议的工作的一个基本特征是比较竞争对手之间的研发伙伴关系和涉及两个或更多具有互补优势的公司的伙伴关系。该项目将采访10到20位工业研发领导者，以完善最初的假设，并通过两到四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，这些财团可以为向数百家已知从事研发伙伴关系的公司提供详细调查的基础。比较主要是在垂直和水平伙伴关系的公司之间进行，而不是在参与和不参与研发伙伴关系的公司之间进行。该试验和任何后续研究的结果对考虑研发伙伴关系的工业研发经理，以及许多政府政策制定者和研发项目经理都是有用的，他们已经成为研发合作的倡导者和支持者，并将其作为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.