RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT DATA NEEDS: PROCEEDINGS OF A WORKSHOP by National Research Council of the National Academies

Author:National Research Council of the National Academies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policy for Science and Technology
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 2005-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

R&D COLLABORATIONS

DONALD SIEGEL: I am going to begin the session on R&D collaborations with some brief background information for those of you who may not be familiar with the issues in this area. There has been tremendous growth in the incidence of R&D collaborations and institutions that foster such collaborations. I’m referring to research joint ventures, strategic alliances and networks, licensing agreements among companies and between universities and firms, sponsored research agreements, industry consortia, and cooperative research and development agreements between firms and federal laboratories. In addition, there are what I would call property-based initiatives to foster collaboration, such as science parks, many of which are located at universities, incubators, and industry/university cooperative research centers. And then we have scientific collaboration, and studies have shown that scientific collaboration is increasing as well.

There are several factors that I think have led to the growth of these collaborations. The first is basically a change in the U.S. national innovation system to promote collaboration. This includes explicit policies to form public-private partnerships with respect to technology. The advanced technology program is an example of that. Policies promoting collaborative research, the National Cooperative Research Act, and the extension of that Act are examples of that. And then we have a whole range of policies – the Bayh-Dole Act and Stevenson-Wydler Act, among others -- to promote technology transfer among universities and federal laboratories and firms. Apart from public policy influences there is clearly an economic motivation for companies to outsource R&D and to share the cost of conducting R&D. Finally, the process of globalization has certainly stimulated international collaboration.

At the same time there is a burgeoning interdisciplinary academic literature on R&D collaborations. Economists, strategy professors, public policy, sociology, and financial economists are looking at different aspects of collaboration—the strategic implications, the economic implications, the financial implications, and even the social implications. Because of a lack of government data a lot of these researchers are relying on proprietary databases, and they are also going out and collecting their own data on partnerships and collaborative effort. Their analyses have been at various levels of aggregation, the individual scientist level, laboratory, the firm, the industry, or the university. These researchers use a wide variety of performance indicators, and they use a mix of both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The major data sets include the Merit database developed by John Hagedoorn and housed at the University of Maastricht. NSF has supported the development of two databases on collaboration. The CORE database which Al Link is responsible for, and the NCRA-RJV database, which Nick Vonortas is in charge of. But then we have again a long list of proprietary databases that have been used to study the different aspects of collaboration -- the Securities Data Company, ISI, Recombinant Capital, and so on. We also have data on university partnerships from the Association of University Technology Managers.

The critical need is for better information on the private and social returns to collaboration. Why? Because the rationale for government intervention is that there

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