Joint Ventures around the Globe from 1990-2000: Forms, Types, Industries, Countries and Ownership Patterns

The structure and dynamics of the global network of inter-firm R&D partnerships 1989–2002

“…Several authors have found that the majority of firms participating in R&D agreements are based in the world's strongest economic regions, the Anglo-Saxon countries, Western Europe, and East Asia (Freeman and Hagedoorn 1994;Duysters and Hagedoorn 1996;Moskalev and Swensen 2007). Our findings summarized in Table 2 confirm this pattern, regardless of whether we look at the worldwide distribution of partnerships, as the previously used concentration measure, or the regional average degree.…”

“…To address the question about the centralization of collaborative activities in certain countries or regions (Research Question 3), Freeman and Hagedoorn (1994) and Moskalev and Swensen (2007) have calculated and compared the number of partnerships per country and region, respectively. Similar to the shortcoming of the previous measure of network density, the number of partnerships per country is not an appropriate measure for a…”

“…In the past two decades, a considerable number of studies have been published that investigate the structure of the global network of R&D partnerships (Freeman and Hagedoorn 1994;Duysters and Hagedoorn 1996;Hagedoorn 1996Hagedoorn , 2002Moskalev and Swensen 2007;Rosenkopf and Schilling 2007). At the same time, there was an even larger number of publications on the network structures in particular industries or regions (e.g., Duysters and Vanhaverbeke 1996;M'Chirgui 2007;Nishimura and Okamuro 2011).…”

“…Research question 2 (Network density over time) Has the density of the global network of inter-firm R&D partnerships increased, fluctuated or decreased during the period 1989-2002? Another commonly studied dimension of the network is the extent to which collaborative activities are regionally and nationally concentrated (Freeman and Hagedoorn 1994;Hagedoorn 2002;Moskalev and Swensen 2007). The underlying motivation is the hope that firms from all countries can, and also do, take advantage from collaborative R&D. By looking at the country affiliation of the participating companies, Freeman and Hagedoorn (1994) have found that the vast majority of all R&D partnerships are formed between firms from the stronger economies in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia.…”

“…The authors conclude that the less developed countries lack the necessary technological and organizational capabilities for the complex task of R&D partnering. Hagedoorn (2002) and Moskalev and Swensen (2007) have found that in particular US firms are involved in many of the recorded R&D partnerships, reflecting the overall dominance of the US economy in major high-tech industries such as the information technology sectors and pharmaceutical biotechnology. However, it is not clear to what extent the findings of these studies reflect differences in the sizes of the national firm populations.…”