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.The proliferation of RJVs has created extensive interest among economists, business analysts, and policy decision-makers and led to the profusion of literature on the topic. This paper critically reviews the literature in industrial economics and strategic management that deals with RJV partner motives and RJV outcomes. The paper categorizes the different streams of this literature and indicates the state-of-the-art, synthesizes important understandings, and suggests key nodes of a future research agenda.
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.
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