How Do Consortia Organize Collaborative R&D? Evidence from the National Cooperative Research Act

Suzanne E. Majewski, Harvard Law School, 154 Lewis International Law Center

8/20/2008
(Original Publish Date: 6/28/2004)

This paper uses contract-level data to presents stylized facts about how firms organize collaborative R&D agreements. It finds several dominant modes of collaboration, including outsourcing R&D, specialization and separation of R&D activities, and more integrated "learning" approaches. It also finds that when consortia participants are direct competitors in existing product markets, they are more likely to outsource their "collaborative" R&D. The results suggest that many consortia organize to avoid spillovers, and therefore do not achieve the cross-pollination of know-how the National Cooperative Research Act was designed to achieve.