From Wires to Partners: How the Internet Has Fostered R&D Collaborations Within Firms

Chris Forman () and Nicolas van Zeebroeck
Additional contact information
Chris Forman: College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30308

Management Science, 2012, vol. 58, issue 8, 1549-1568

Abstract: How did the diffusion of the Internet influence research collaborations within firms? We examine the relationship between business use of basic Internet technology and the size and geographic composition of industrial research teams between 1992 and 1998. We find robust empirical evidence that basic Internet adoption is associated with an increased likelihood of collaborative patents from geographically dispersed teams. On the contrary, we find no evidence of such a link between Internet adoption and within-location collaborative patents, nor do we find any evidence of a relationship between basic Internet and single-inventor patents. We interpret these results as evidence that adoption of basic Internet significantly reduced the coordination costs of research teams, but find little evidence that a drop in the costs of shared resource access significantly improved research productivity. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Keywords: R&D organization; geography of innovation; Internet adoption; IT investments; collaborative work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (71)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1505 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: From wires to partners: How the Internet has fostered R&D collaborations within firms (2012)
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:inm:ormnsc:v:58:y:2012:i:8:p:1549-1568

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().