The Nature and Consequences of Firms' Involvement and Collaboration in Basic Research.

Although prior studies have suggested that firms' involvement in basic scientific research, including collaboration with university scientists, can improve firms’ technological performance, little is known about the underlying mechanisms behind the performance benefits and about the contingencies for such benefits to occur. The aim of the proposed research project is to examine the nature and consequences of firms' involvement in basic scientific research. First, we examine the mechanisms by which basic research may affect technological performance, considering the creation of first-mover advantages, improved absorptive capacity, and more effective access to university partnerships and recruitment of high-quality personnel. Second, we focus on the specific characteristics and role of firms' collaborations with universities in basic research. We examine which characteristics of universities (or university departments) make them preferred collaboration partners and investigate whether the effectiveness of university-firm collaboration depends on these characteristics. We focus on the quality of academic partners, exclusivity of partnerships, and (international) collaboration. We aim to construct a unique micro-level panel dataset on 400 global R&D leading firms in three broadly defined industries: life sciences, information and communication technologies (ICT) and environmental technologies. The dataset will cover detailed information on firm's (collaborative) publication efforts, information on universities as alliance partners, patent applications and their citation patterns (to basic research), and -for the life sciences industry- information on applied clinical research activities and clinical trial success.