The dark side of R&D collaborations

Enrico Guzzini () and Donato Iacobucci ()
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Enrico Guzzini: Università degli Studi eCampus

No 1405, Working Papers from c.MET-05 - Centro Interuniversitario di Economia Applicata alle Politiche per L'industria, lo Sviluppo locale e l'Internazionalizzazione

Abstract: Collaboration with firms and public research institutions (PRI) is expected to raise the innovative performance of firms. Collaboration is also likely to increase the cost of innovation because of leakages of strategic information, appropriability and coordination problems. When collaborating with PRI the latter problem is expected to be stronger thus raising the probability of project failure. The aim of this paper is to investigate if and to what extent collaboration in R&D projects raises the probability of failure: i.e. abandoning or delaying innovative projects. It also aims at verifying if and to what extent the collaboration with PRI increases the likelihood of failure. We use data from the fourth Italian Community Innovation Survey (CIS 4) which collected data for the three-year period 2002-2004. The empirical results support the hypothesis that collaboration significantly impacts the probability of abandoning or delaying innovative projects, thus raising the cost of innovation. Collaboration with PRI does not raise the likelihood of failure more than what observed for the collaboration with other partners. Moreover, delaying is influenced by cost factors (such as the lack of financial resources) and knowledge factors (such as the lack of qualified personnel); abandonment is significantly associated with market factors (such as uncertain demand).

Keywords: R&D collaboration; project failure; public research institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L14 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-ppm and nep-sbm
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