Publicly Funded R&D Collaborations and Patent Outcome in Germany

Abstract

Die Discussion Papers dienen einer möglichst schnellen Verbreitung von neueren Forschungsarbeiten des ZEW. Die Beiträge liegen in alleiniger Verantwortung der Autoren und stellen nicht notwendigerweise die Meinung des ZEW dar.Discussion Papers are intended to make results of ZEW research promptly available to other economists in order to encourage discussion and suggestions for revisions. The authors are solely responsible for the contents which do not necessarily represent the opinion of the ZEW.Download this ZEW Discussion Paper from our ftp server:ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp0324.pdf Non-technical SummaryAt the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000, heads of state and governments set the European Union the ambitious goal of becoming "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by the end of the decade". Two years later the Council reaffirmed this goal in Barcelona and added it to a more specific but equally ambitious target of raising EU spending on research and development to 3% of GDP by 2010 -with two thirds of this spend by the business sector.From the perspective of innovation, public R&D spending is an input factor which should strengthen the European Union's competitiveness in future technologies. In this context, the question arises, whether public R&D spending enlarges the welfare of societies. An analysis of such a question requires an identification of input-output relationships between publicly funded R&D activities and their results, like patent outcome or commercialized products and services as well as cost reducing processes. In this paper we investigate patent applications of firms. As the stimulation of R&D cooperations and networks has become very popular in technology policies of the EU, we focus our analysis especially on R&D collaborations at the firm level.First, we describe the history of public R&D funding in Germany and the development of measures encouraging collaborative R&D activities among firms and public research institutions. Afterwards, we investigate empirically the impact of such measures on patenting activity at the firm level. The main issue of our analysis is to distinguish three different groups of firms: (i) non-collaborating companies, (ii) collaborating firms which are involved in publicly funded R&D consortia, (iii) firms with only privately financed R&D collaborations.We use a sample of 4,132 observations on German firms from the 1990s and apply Probit estimations on the propensity to patent as well as a count data model on the number of granted patents. In a further step, we carry out a non-parametric kernel-based matching to take account of a possible self-selection bias in the sample of publicly funded firms. The microeconometric results show that collaborating firms are more likely to patent than non-collaborating firms. This points to the existence of knowledge flows which generate positive spillover effects among network partners. Within the group of collaborating firms, participants in publicly sponsored R&D consortia exhib...

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