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    How do industry inventors collaborate with academic researchers? The choice between shared and unilateral governance forms

    Bodas Freitas, I.M. and Lawson, C. and Rossi, Federica and Geuna, A. (2014) How do industry inventors collaborate with academic researchers? The choice between shared and unilateral governance forms. In: Patrucco, P.P. (ed.) The economics of knowledge generation and distribution. The role of interactions in the system dynamics of innovation and growth. Routledge Studies in the Modern World Economy. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9780415821582.

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    Abstract

    We investigate under what circumstances firms (industry inventors) are more likely to engage in interactions where governance of the relationship is shared between the firm and the university, as opposed to interactions where the relationship is governed unilaterally by the firm. Using PIEMINV, an original dataset of European industry patents in the Italian region of Piedmont, we analyse the characteristics of inventors with diverse experience in projects involving interactions with universities, governed by institutional contracts or personal contracts. Our results suggest that reliance among inventors of the two forms of governance is almost equal, and that unilateral governance forms are preferred when there are high levels of trust among the parties based on embeddedness in local social and education networks. This is likely because it involves less cumbersome and more direct interactions. We find also that knowledge characteristics are not particularly important discriminants of the choice between governance forms: the advantage of shared governance seems to reside mainly in the possibility to mitigate monitoring and asymmetric information problems in contexts of relatively low levels of mutual knowledge and trust.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book Section
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): academic knowledge, university-industry knowledge transfer, governance of R&D collaborations
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Business School
    Research Centres and Institutes: Innovation Management Research, Birkbeck Centre for
    Depositing User: Federica Rossi
    Date Deposited: 23 Sep 2014 12:58
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:12
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/10586

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