Teaming up with Large R&D Investors: Good or Bad for Knowledge Production and Diffusion?

Sara Amoroso and Simone Vannuccini

SPRU Working Paper Series from SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School

Abstract: The participation of top R&D players to publicly funded research collaborations is a common yet unexplored phenomenon.If,on the one hand,including top R&D firms creates opportunities for knowledge spillovers and increases the chance for a project to be funded, on the other hand, the uneven nature of such partnerships and the asymmetry in knowledge appropriation capabilities could hinder the overall performance of such collaborations. In this paper, we study the role of top R&D investors in the performance of publicly funded R&D consortia (in terms of number of patents and publications). Using a unique data set that matches informationon R&D collaborative projects and proposals with data on international top R&D firms, we find that indeed teaming up with leading R&D firms increases the probability to obtain funds. However,the participation of such R&D leaders hinders the innovative performance of the funded projects, both in terms of patents and publications. In light of this evidence, the benefits of mobilizing top R&D players should be carefully leveraged in the evaluation and design of innovation policies aimed at R&D collaboration and technology diffusion.

Keywords: Collaboration; public funding; innovation performance; appropriability; top R&D investor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L24 L25 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-ppm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php? ... nnuccini.pdf&site=25 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Teaming up with Large R&D Investors: Good or Bad for Knowledge Production and Diffusion? (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sru:ssewps:2019-20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SPRU Working Paper Series from SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by University of Sussex Business School Communications Team ().