Research alliances and collaborations: Introduction to the special issue

Cooperative Research and Development (R&D) strategies, or R&D alliances, have become a normal and yet strategically important part of business decision making in many industries in recent years. Broadly defined, R&D alliances include any agreed-upon cooperative R&D arrangement between firms, such as joint ventures, consortia, technology partnerships and informal networking arrangements. These days, R&D collaboration is often viewed as essential for creating industry-standard platforms and technological innovations on which new knowledge work can be developed. Important issues for R&D alliances include measurement of the output from R&D alliances and where and how, if at all, government should be involved. Government is typically interested in identifying the important areas of R&D in which firms tend to under-invest and then in taking policy measures to correct the perceived under-investment. Government plays an essential role in R&D alliances in a number of ways. First of all, government research agencies do their own joint research involving universities, private-sector firms and other organizations. They also provide funding to certain types of research projects, joint or otherwise, in both the private and public sectors. How these government funds are allocated and who gets involved in these research projects may have some impact on a nation's economic performance. Of even greater importance perhaps, government determines the legal settings in which private-sector firms operate: for example, government usually determines the conditions under which competing firms can engage in joint R&D projects, the policies for the taxation and financing of R&D investment, and regulations such as allowable levels of auto exhaust gas emissions. The nature of R&D alliances varies significantly from one country to another. For example, there are differences among countries in how competition or antitrust policies are applied to R&D alliances. The papers in this Special Issue discuss economic and managerial issues associated with R&D alliances and collaborations. Four broad topics on R&D collaborations that are discussed by the papers in this Special Issue are: the implications of R&D collaborations for firm performance; the role of government; models for R&D collaborations; and measurement and accounting issues. The papers in each of these four topical groupings are briefly summarized below. The first four papers discuss the implications of R&D alliances for firm performance (e.g. patent production) and other aspects of firm behavior. The paper by Sakakibara and Branstetter empirically evaluates the impacts of the research consortia sponsored by the US Department of Commerce's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) on …