The management of industry–university joint research projects: how do partners coordinate and control R&D activities?

Benefits derived from industry–university joint research projects (e.g., competitive advantages for firms, opportunities for field experimentation, the funding of academics’ activities and knowledge and technology transfer among partners) are strongly affected by the management system exploited to combine partners’ resources and tasks. Nevertheless, scholars have not paid great attention to management practices of collaborative research, leaving the best practices undefined. Aiming to fill this literature gap, this paper is a first attempt to open the black box of the management of the implementation stage of research and development (R&D) cooperation. The investigation, based on case studies, focuses on how participants of R&D cooperation coordinate and control their activities and what drives the selection of integrating mechanisms. The comparison of coordination and control systems implemented in six industry–university joint research projects highlights that planning and mutual adjustment practices are combined in different ways to manage R&D cooperation. Project and relationship characteristics affect the configuration of the management system. Task uncertainty leads to the decentralization of coordination and control practices, equivocality provides incentives for group coordination mode and reduces the need of informal ongoing monitoring and reciprocal interdependence among partners requires the exploitation of up-to-date project plans.     

R&;D productivity and the organization of cluster policy: an empirical evaluation of the Industrial Cluster Project in Japan

Industrial clusters have attracted increasing attention as important locations of innovation. Therefore, several countries have started promotion policies for industrial clusters. However, there are few empirical studies on cluster policies. This paper examines the effects of the “Industrial Cluster Project” (ICP) in Japan on the R&D productivity of participants, using a unique dataset of 229 small firms, and discusses the conditions necessary for the effective organization of cluster policies. Different from former policy approaches, the ICP aims at building collaborative networks between universities and industries and supports the autonomous development of existing regional industries without direct intervention in the clustering process. Thus far, the ICP is similar to indirect support systems adopted by successful European clusters. Our estimation results suggest that participation in the cluster project alone does not affect R&D productivity. Moreover, research collaboration with a partner in the same cluster region decreases R&D productivity both in terms of the quantity and quality of patents. Therefore, in order to improve the R&D efficiency of local firms, it is also important to construct wide-range collaborative networks within and beyond the clusters, although most clusters focus on the network at a narrowly defined local level. However, cluster participants apply for more patents than others without reducing patent quality when they collaborate with national universities in the same cluster region.     

The influence of public programs on inter-firm R&D collaboration strategies: project-level evidence from EU FP5 and FP6

Inter-firms R&D collaborations are often seen as an effective mean to access new resources, to innovate and/or to enter new markets in a turbulent environment characterized by fierce competition. However, all R&D partnerships do not have the same strategic importance. We analyze the strategic features of two types of partnerships that are seldom compared in the academic literature on R&D alliances: EU-sponsored inter-firms collaborations on the one hand, and non-sponsored, spontaneous inter-firm collaborations on the other. We compare their incentives and coordination mechanisms, and derive theoretical propositions that we test empirically. Our econometric analysis uses original data on (sponsored and non-sponsored) projects conducted by participants in the 5th and 6th European R&D Framework Programs. Our empirical findings support our main propositions. EU-funded collaborations are more exploratory and more focused on peripheral competences than spontaneous R&D collaborations. They are also less flexible, due to rigid monitoring rules which are nevertheless crucial to the projects?? success. However, there is no major difference between the different types of EU-sponsored collaborations, which pleads for a simplification of these policy instruments.     

R&D subsidy games: a cost sharing approach vs. reward for performance

This paper investigates government subsidy games for private sector research and development (R&D) in a two-country two-firm intra-industry trade model. Two funding structures are compared: ??cost sharing?? vs. ??reward for performance.?? Both the theoretical evidence and the results of a Monte Carlo simulation suggest that cost sharing is associated with higher social surplus and quality improvement because it prompts the firm to do more R&D. In a cost sharing program government and firm R&D are always complements. In the reward for performance program government and firm R&D may be complements, but are usually substitutes. In the Monte Carlo results the average firm contribution to R&D expenditure is actually negative with a reward for performance funding structure??raising the question of whether it might be construed as corporate welfare. Finally, the paper characterizes funding priorities for both structures in the case when subsidy dollars are scarce and when they are not.     

Regional Technology Policy and the Emergence of an R&D System in the Basque Country

The political changes of the late 1970s early 1980s opened up a process of devolution and decentralization in Spain which reached very important levels in historical regions such as the Basque Country and Catalonia. In the R&D policy realm, Basque government policies had an important impact in the emergence of a regional R&D system from stratch in a short period of time. The industry-oriented Basque model was also rather innovative in the Spanish context of the 1980s, which was dominated by public, basic science-oriented national research councils. In this paper we analyze the process of configuration of regional R&D policies in the Basque Country by looking at the interplay between structural factors, actors, interests, ideas, and institutions. We also look at the main achievements and shortcomings of those policies.     

R&D spinoffs: Serendipity vs. a managed process

This paper describes some of the spinoff benefits that can result from R&D projects, and categorizes them in terms of the dimensions of market and technical newness. These dimensions are discussed with reference to two types of spinoffs: 1) alternative market applications, when the results of an R&D project are subsequently applied to a market or use that differs from the originally intended application, and 2) second-generation technologies, when the technology that was the subject of an R&D project is significantly altered or enhanced in unanticipated ways through subsequent R&D. Examples from the Department of Energy's Energy-Related Inventions Program are integrated into the results of literature review to illustrate key concepts, including core technologies, degrees of market and technology newness, technology robustness, and the nature of connections linking spinoffs to prior R&D investments. The paper concludes by discussing spinoffs as a managerial strategy.     

Collaborative R&;D: intellectual property rights between Tsinghua University and multinational companies

Tsinghua University, one of the top universities in China, has conducted a lot of collaborative R&D projects with multinational companies in the recent years. One of tough issues in the collaborative R&D is to deal with the intellectual property rights. The Chinese Patent Law and other relevant laws make Tsinghua University to look for more intellectual property rights. Several factors such as the input from the collaborative parties, the property of R&D, the relation between the collaborative project and the activities of R&D made before, or to be made after, the collaboration, and the life and potential market of the technologies play an important rule in the treatment of Intellectual property rights. The different collaborative models have different models of the distribution of intellectual property rights between the University and multinational companies.      

Factors influencing technology transfer: The case of China

Transferring and utilizing technology in developing economies is a vital issue for economic growth. Often the separation between R&D institutes and industrial concerns limits the transfer of technology. The People's Republic of China, which has conducted R&D in institutes separate from the potential user firms, has recently moved to facilitate domestic technology transfer from R&D institutes to R&D consumers. This study, based on the statistical analysis of 60 R&D institutes in the machinery sector in China, found that, while R&D intensity improves transfer of technology, funding and employee mobility hinders transfer. His special area is in science and technology policy. He had worked for the State Science and Technology Commission of China for six years before he came to the US.     

Underinvestment in Public Good Technologies

Although underinvestment phenomena are the rationale for government subsidization of research and development (R&D), the concept is poorly defined and its impact is seldom quantified. Conceptually, underinvestment in industrial R&D can take the form of either a wrong amount or a suboptimal composition of R&D investment. In both cases, R&D policy has not adequately modeled the relevant economic phenomena and thus is unable to characterize, explain, and measure the underinvestment. Four factors can cause systematic underinvestment in R&D-intensive industries: complexity, timing, existence of economies of scale and scope, and spillovers. The impacts of these factors vary in intensity over the typical technology life cycle, so government policy responses must be managed dynamically. In addition to understanding the causes of underinvestment in R&D, the magnitude of the deficiency relative to some “optimum” must be estimated to enable a ranking of technology areas with respect to expected net economic benefits from a government subsidy. Project selection criteria must therefore be based on quantitative and qualitative indicators that represent the nature and the magnitude of identified market failures. The major requirement for management of R&D policy therefore is a methodology that regularly assesses long-term expected benefits and risks from current and proposed R&D portfolios. To this end, a three-stage process is proposed to effectively carry out R&D policy analysis. The three stages are (1) identify and explain the causes of the underinvestment, (2) characterize and assess the investment trends and their impacts, and (3) estimate the magnitude of the underinvestment relative to a perceived optimum in terms of its cost to the economy. Only after all three stages of analysis have been completed can the underinvestment pattern be matched with the appropriate policy response.     

Conditionally-mediated effects of scale in collaborative R&D

This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation into the role of project scale, as reflected in consortium size, on the impacts obtained by partners participating in publicly-funded collaborative R&D projects. I argue in this study that scale may affect performance indirectly rather than directly. Specifically, I model the influence of scale as being mediated by a set of intervening variables that may be said to ??transmit?? both positive and negative effects through (i) complementarity of resources, (ii) learning, and (iii) transaction costs in project implementation. Moreover, I hypothesize that these indirect effects are conditional on certain moderators that include resources committed, project management mechanisms, and project uncertainty and scope. The results offered in this study largely confirm the proposition of conditionally-mediated effects of scale on performance. They indicate that a number of conditional indirect effects are indeed significant, and surprisingly, that these effects are mostly negative.     

The R&D performance of the South African manufacturing sector, 1970–1993

In this article we undertake a detailed exploration of the research and development activities in one particular middle-income country. We explore what the data from R&D surveys can tell us about the levels, the determinants and the effectiveness of R&D in the manufacturing sector. We point to some of the broader factors that may have influenced South Africa’s drive to improve the technological capacity of its manufacturing sector, but we mostly focus on those issues associated directly with R&D. We show that the degree of interaction between the different domains of R&D activity, business, government and the tertiary sector has been weak, and that the possibility of positive spill-overs between these domains has not been fully exploited. In addition, little or no policy intervention designed to stimulate R&D activity by industry has been deployed in South Africa. We find that South African R&D activity has mainly been reactive in character and suggest that this lies at the heart of South Africa’s mixed R&D performance in relation to other developing countries.     

Dynamics,Experimental Economics,and Entrepreneurship

Economic experiments are introduced and proposed as the methodology of choice for a subset of research questions in technological entrepreneurship, an approach that has not yet been used in this field. Moreover, we provide an entrepreneurship-specific framework that matches types of research questions and feasible empirical methods. For example, a very dynamic environment is seen as a threat to most field studies, whereas the need to have entrepreneurs or other practitioners as subjects is almost a criterion for preclusion in economic experiments. The design of a recent economic experiment dealing with the timing of exploitation of an R&D based opportunity is explained and analyzed. We finally discuss the applicability of economic experiments to entrepreneurship questions in technology transfer.     

Assessing the relationship between R&D subsidy,R&D cooperation and absorptive capacity: an investigation on the manufacturing Spanish case

Private companies want to eliminate outgoing spillovers while policymakers seek to maximize them. With subsidized R&D cooperation agreements both agents partially achieve their objectives. For this reason, in Europe, policymakers grant subsidies for R&D activities with the condition of establishing R&D cooperation agreements. This study explores the relationship of complementarity between R&D subsidy, R&D cooperation and absorptive capacity in the context of its contribution to labor productivity of enterprises. The data used comes from the Technological Innovation Panel (PITEC), managed by the Spanish National Statistics Institute. We selected manufacturing companies in the period 2008–2013. We evaluate the existence of complementarity through the systems approach and the interaction approach. The econometric technique that we used to estimate the coefficients of our empirical model was maximum-likelihood random effects. As a consequence of the low absorptive capacity of Spanish manufacturing firms we find that R&D subsidies and R&D cooperation agreements are not complementary variables, i.e., receiving public subsidies as a result of establishing R&D cooperation agreements has a lower impact on productivity than the sum of the individual impacts of R&D cooperation and R&D subsidies. In consequence, this result calls into question the convenience of using subsidized R&D cooperation agreements as a tool for promoting innovation in EU countries as there are notable differences between the companies in these countries in terms of absorption capacity.     

Do R&D strategies in high-tech sectors differ from those in low-tech sectors? An alternative approach to testing the pooling assumption

Most studies investigating the determinants of R&D investment consider pooled estimates. However, if the parameters are heterogeneous, pooled coefficients may not provide reliable estimates of individual industry effects. Hence pooled parameters may conceal valuable information that may help target government tools more efficiently across heterogeneous industries. There is little evidence to date on the decomposition of the determinants of R&D investment by industry. Moreover, the existing work does not distinguish between those R&D determinants for which pooling may be valid and those for which it is not. In this paper, we test the pooling assumption for a panel of manufacturing industries and find that pooling is valid only for output fluctuations, adjustment costs and interest rates. Implementing the test results into our model, we find government funding is significant only for low-tech R&D. Foreign R&D and skilled labour matter only in high-tech sectors. These results suggest important implications for R&D policy.     

Strategy first in international joint ventures

International technology- based joint ventures are proliferating despite their inherent complexity and high risk of failure. US firms continue to employ international joint ventures as a vehicle for collaborative research and development (R & D); foreign investors prefer the joint venture for investing in the emerging market economies of Eastern Europe. Tipping the balance in favor of successful joint ventures requires a strategic approach from the very advent of entering into an international R&D arrangement: an approach in which clear objectives are set and alternative ways to reach these objectives are systematically evaluated. Several frameworks are presented that clarify and facilitate the decisionmaking process during the initial phases of considering a joint venture in which project objectives are developed, alternative R&D arrangements are evaluated, and potential partners are identified and eventually selected.     

“We really don’t want to move,but...”: identity and strategy in the internationalisation of industrial R&;D

In Norway, as in many other high-cost OECD countries in a geographical and cultural periphery, policy-makers seem to have given up attempts at attracting large numbers of foreign R&D investments. Instead, a major focus of innovation policies is to help companies internationalise yet with an aim to maintain or even increase their level of R&D and other innovation activities nationally. Based on case studies of eight Norwegian companies and their motives for and experiences with internationalisation of R&D, this article questions this policy. From the perspective of the companies, many factors explain how, why and where they carry out their R&D activities.      

Measuring the economic impact of research joint ventures supported by the EU Framework Programme

The objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of international R&D cooperation on firms?? economic performance. Our approach, based on a complete data set with information about Spanish participants in research joint ventures supported by the EU Framework Programme during the period 1995?C2005, establishes a recursive model structure to capture the relationship between R&D cooperation, knowledge generation and economic results, which are measured by labour productivity. In the analysis we take into account that the participation in this specific type of cooperative projects implies a selection process that includes both the self-selection by participants to join the consortia and the selection of projects by the European Commission to award the public aid. Empirical analysis has confirmed that: (1) R&D cooperation has a positive impact on the technological capacity of firms, captured through intangible fixed assets and (2) the technological capacity of firms is positively related to their productivity.     

Firm innovation in policy-driven parks and spontaneous clusters: the smaller firm the better?

Mixed evidence has been found regarding how locating in a cluster or a park affects firms?? performance. This paper investigates how locating in different types of clusters and parks interacted by firm size or in-house R&D capability affects a firm??s innovation. Empirically testing the research hypotheses by the data of 165 Taiwan??s manufacturing firms in the information and communication technology sector and taking policy-driven parks (e.g., science parks and industrial parks) and spontaneously clusters as examples, we find that in emerging economies, firms with inferior in-house R&D capability gain more innovation benefits by locating in a science park or a spontaneous cluster while smaller firms gain more innovation benefits by locating in an industry park or a spontaneous cluster. Moreover, our findings also suggest that locating in a science park, smaller firms benefit more than larger firms in terms of innovation performance whereas larger firms benefit more than smaller firms in terms of market performance. The findings suggest that in emerging economies, compared to larger firms, smaller firms are less influenced by negative spillover effect when locating in clusters or parks.     

Maximizing R&D investments in the Department of Energy's Environmental cleanup program

The investment made in research and development (R&D) by the Department of Energy's (DOE) Environmental Management (EM) program must result in products that will significantly benefit the Department's cleanup efforts. A customer-oriented decision-making process for managing technology development is needed to appropriately link technology development activities with cleanup operations. This paper presents a process for R&D management, which we have named the Technology Investment Decision Model.The model identifies six R&D stages leading to technology implementation. The model incorporates decision points (or “gates”) within the R&D process where projects are selected for funding. The purpose of this “stage-gate” process is to ensure early evaluation of projects against technical and nontechnical criteria in order to ensure that end products will not only provide superior performance, but also meet the acceptance requirements of the intended customers. The model addresses the technology transfer and commercialization factors that must be considered to get technological innovations into the marketplace. The model is now being implemented within the EM technology development program and is providing a common framework to align the Department's environmental R&D activities with its cleanup goals.     

Innovation in the U.S. Service Sector

This paper contributes to ard a better understanding of innovation in the service sector by focusing on the disparate nature of R&D in the U.S. service sector as learned through case studies of the U.S. telecommunications, financial services, systems integration services, and research and development testing services industries. Based on this understanding of the nature and scope of R&D therein, a new policy-oriented model of innovation specific to the service sector is posited. Also, policy recommendations are offered with regard to the public sector’s collection and interpretation of R&D data related to the service sector.