Stavros Ioannides

Research Joint Ventures

Inter-firm collaboration is not new. What is new is that such collaboration has exploded during the past couple of decades, in parallel to the intensification of international competition. Moreover, the nature of collaboration has changed, shifting from peripheral interests to the very core functions of the corporation, and from equity to non-equity forms of collaboration. Importantly, cooperation focusing on the generation, exchange, and/or adaptation of new technologies has risen at very fast rates. Research joint ventures, the focus of this paper, belong in the latter category. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003.

Science and technology policies towards research joint ventures

Since the early 1980s, developed country governments have made a strong effort to promote cooperative industrial research. Europe has been at the forefront. The support of international research consortia has been the major funding mechanism of the Framework Programmes on research, technological and development (RTD). Awareness and support for cooperative RTD has also increased at the national level, but there are great policy approach differences between member states, and between Europe and the USA and Japan. An interesting development of the last two decades in Europe has been the increasing convergence of key policy areas at the national level that directly affect the incentives of firms to participate in research partnerships, including competition and intellectual property rights policies. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

European Collaboration in Research and Development

The contributions collected in this volume focus explicitly on cooperative R&D in Europe. The first part of the book offers empirical evidence on the extent, scope and direction of this collaboration and explores the motives and problems of the participating firms, as well as the perceived benefits they have enjoyed. The second part deals with the difficult policy issues that diverse national R&D regimes create for successful cooperative research and international convergence. The extensive survey results of European firms allow the authors to compare collaborative research policies in various EU countries and contrast the policy design that has emerged in the EU with that of the USA.

Cooperative R&D as a means for knowledge creation. Experience from European publicly funded partnerships

This paper explores the performance of cooperative R&D agreements in terms of organisational knowledge creation. A unique dataset of subsidised cooperative R&D agreements is used to provide evidence on the relationship between the benefits from undertaking research cooperation and a set of factors that describe technological and organisational capabilities of firms and constraints arising in the context of cooperation. Findings point to an enhanced notion of absorptive capability as an enabling condition for effective exploitation of firms involvement in R&D cooperation.