The Evaluation of Strategic Research Partnerships

A strategic alliance ‘enables a firm to focus resources on its core skills and competencies while acquiring other components or capabilities it lacks from the marketplace’. Such alliances extend beyond research, the focus of this paper, and take a variety of forms. My own preference is for the ‘operating entity’ and ‘secretariat’ classification of Ouchi and Vonortas, which at least have the merit of being based on functional differences. An operating entity alliance or joint venture involves creation of an alliance-specific laboratory or other research establishment, while a secretariat alliance implies the circulation among partners of results obtained at partners’ research operations. It is sometimes said that theoretical research in economics is a largely self-contained activity, firmly insulated from the vagaries of evidence about the subjects it analyzes. The extent to which this might be true in general is beyond the scope of this paper, but it does seem to be an accurate description of a good deal of the recent theoretical literature on R&D cooperation. What is even more discouraging, however, is that much of the policy literature on R&D cooperation seems disconnected from both mainstream theoretical and empirical work on the phenomenon. In Section 2, I review the literature on R&D cooperation. Section 3 takes a closer look at the pharmaceutical sector, while Section 4 turns to evaluation of public sector R&D and public-private sector cooperation, while Section 5 considers measuring the returns to public support for private R&D. Section 6 looks at private returns to R&D. Section 7 comments briefly on insights from industrial economics for evaluating the returns to R&D and Section 8 presents a summary of alternative measures of research alliance performance.