Essays on innovation in multinational enterprises: R&D organization, knowledge transfer and global mindset.

The purpose of this project is to explore the role of university scientists as firms’ key partners in basic research. The first research objective is to explore the conditions for effective collaboration - in terms of impact on firm performance - between universities and firms. We zoom in on the role of university star scientists, i.e. leading scientists in particular fields. First, we seek to explain why certain firms collaborate with university stars while others do not. Second, controlling for this ‘selection effect’, we will examine whether the benefits of basic research collaborations with stars depend on the joint firm-star involvement in follow-up applied research, and the degree of exclusive access that firms can secure to a star. Third, we will explore to what extent direct collaboration with stars is required, or whether indirect linkages (e.g. via hiring of PhDs from the star’s lab) are sufficient to yield a performance premium. The second research objective of the project is to increase the understanding of the geographic dimension in university-firm collaborations, again with a focus on basic research. We will seek to understand when and why firms choose international or inter-regional collaboration over local collaboration, and analyse their potentially differential performance effects. The geographic distribution of star scientists is expected to be an important determinant of the choice for local versus international collaboration with universities. The final research objective of the project is to study how firms organize their internal R&D activities to benefit from collaborations with (top) universities and (star) scientists in basic research. We focus on the role of gatekeepers (distinguishing between star and non-star corporate researchers) and boundary spanning activities between basic and applied research (e.g. through joint research and personnel rotation). We address these research questions in the life sciences and ICT, two science-intensive industries that differ in several important ways relevant to our research objectives, such as the nature of technology (“discrete” versus “complex”), characteristics of the R&D process (e.g. project lead time), and the geographical specialization of scientific expertise.