Abstract
Past managerial literature found that prior experience of organisations is an important factor affecting somehow their willingness in participating to a R&D consortium. Our research extends this body of knowledge in two directions: (1) by investigating how prior experience affects the choices of organisations coordinating project proposals for R&D programs (the so-called “coordinators”) in terms of composition of their R&D consortia, and (2) by analysing how prior experience affects co-opetition between project coordinators. The assumption of the study is that organisations coordinating and forming R&D consortia for R&D programs usually engage in co-opetitive relationships with each other. Therefore, the research question of the paper is, “how does prior experience affect the coordinators’ choices about the formation of their inter-organisational consortia within a R&D program?” We analysed 2.895 R&D projects of inter-organisational consortia which received funds by the European Union under more Framework Programmes in order to implement R&D projects for the aerospace industry.
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Notes
Absorptive capacity is the “firm’s ability to value, assimilate and apply new knowledge towards commercial ends”. The other key condition is the intensity of effort (Cohen and Levinthal 1990).
Open innovation is “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively”(Chesbrough et al. p. 1 2006).
By experienced coordinators we considered organizations belonging to the first decile of the ranking based on the number of projects coordinated at time t-1.
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Although the paper reports the common ideas of both the authors, Francesco Schiavone wrote sections: 1, 2, 3. Michele Simoni wrote sections 4, 5, 6.
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Schiavone, F., Simoni, M. Prior Experience and Co-opetition in R&D Programs. J Knowl Econ 7, 819–835 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-015-0251-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-015-0251-x