Industry - University Cooperative Research Centers By James D . Adams

This paper concerns the Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRCs) and their influence on a sample of industrial R&D laboratories in the chemicals, machinery, electrical equipment, and transportation equipment industries. IUCRCs are centers of applied engineering within universities that are expressly designed to be dependent on industrial support, and thus to be more sensitive to the research needs of firms. Along these lines we find that membership in the IUCRCs is associated with the importance to R&D laboratories of hiring graduate students, faculty consultants and co-authoring with university faculty, just as one would expect from the stated mission of the IUCRCs. In additional research we explore the implications of IUCRC membership and the stock of R&D (in a sub-sample of cited IUCRCs) for patenting and research expenditure by the R&D laboratories. We find a positive relationship between IUCRC membership, particularly the NSF centers, and laboratory patenting and research expenditure, even while holding constant several measures of size and specialization. But IUCRC membership is concentrated on the larger and more science-oriented laboratories, again especially for the NSF centers. This suggests that the apparent IUCRC effects partly show the dependence of membership on laboratory size and quality. This suspicion is confirmed when we undertake a study of laboratory membership. We find that this is more likely the larger is the laboratory and the relevant pool of university research that the laboratory draws upon.