Arman Avadikyan

Organisational rules, codification and knowledge creation in inter-organisation cooperative agreements

Abstract The aim of our paper is to analyse the process of collaboration between independent firms linked by a technological agreement in the energy field, with a specific focus on the degree of codification of inter-organisational rules. Considering the agreement as a collection of different types of more or less codified rules, we show that their degree of codification and some other characteristics have an impact on the process of inter-firm cooperation. The paper first provides an analytical framework defining the concept and the types of rules relevant for our purpose. A rule is conceived to solve a problem of allocation or creation of resources; it serves a main function which can be of a cognitive, incentive or coordination nature; it is ambivalent, i.e. it entails side functions in addition to the main one. Two theoretical propositions are then developed and largely confirmed by our empirical research results based on two detailed case studies in the emerging field of fuel cell (FC) technology.

Fuel cells in Canada: from entrepreneurship to innovation clustering

When it comes to Canada and the fuel cell technology, Ballard Power Systems comes to mind as one of the most important companies in the development of PEM fuel cell systems. This being said, Canada’s effort devoted to speeding up development and commercialisation of this technology is more comprehensive and the result of many public and private contributions over the last 25 years4.

The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles and the US DoE Transportation Fuel Cells Programme

The aim of our paper is not to give a comprehensive view of fuel cell R&D activities in the United States. Our contribution is far more modest and attempts to present, according to the official and non-official literature we could gather, a description and analysis of a particular but important private-public R&D programme, namely the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) within which PEM fuel cells for transportation have been actively investigated since 1993. Although it was intended to last until 2004, PNGV was replaced in 2002 by a new programme called Freedom Car. One can speculate about the reasons for this premature ending. It appears however that the objectives, the organisation and the milestones of this ten-year programme needed to be brought into line with the technological, political and strategic evolutions that took place within this time frame at the national and international levels. According to official documents, the new initiative will last until 2010 and will give priority to fuel cell and hydrogen technologies as a long-term response to energy security and environmental issues.

The Japanese R&D system in the field of fuel cell vehicles

Although Japan has initiated and funded R&D projects on fuel cells since the mid1970s, on a regular basis, research in the field of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) as well as hydrogen technologies started growing in scale in the early 1990s with the MITI programmes and the considerable expansion of car manufacturers activities.

Introduction: the economic dynamics of fuel cell technologies

Fuel cell technologies (FCT) are technological solutions for the generation of energy that can find considerable potential applications in the domains of stationary power, automotive and portable equipment markets. FCT, which found their first applications in the 60s with the Apollo programme, have recently benefited from significant technological advances. These advances aroused particular enthusiasm in the automotive sector. The car industry, which has to adapt to increasingly severe pollution norms, is actually very interested in FCT as a potential substitute — at some stage — for internal combustion engines, which have been dominating vehicle propulsion for almost a century. However, if this looks like a classical story of emergence and development of a new technology, for many reasons, FCT are not similar to other technologies.