Strategists and Academics Essays on interaction in R&D

Sammanfattning: This doctoral thesis consists of five self-contained essays on interaction in R&D between university researchers and private firms. Together, these essays explore the conditions under which private firms benefit from spillovers from publicly funded and organised research. From the first essay, which sets out to empirically validate the theoretical arguments about the benefits of university-industry interaction for private firms, the thesis follows a line of pursuit that goes back and forth between exploration of the different benefits that firms enjoy from university interaction and the relationships between these benefits and the conditions of interaction. In essay II, a typology of rationales for establishing cooperative relations is presented. A considerable breadth of interaction rationales is documented, but on closer examination, a “core” set of rationales related to innovation in terms of invented or improved products or processes are found to be the main drivers of interaction. Developing this view, three critical issues previously studied within innovation economics are re-considered from the point of view of firm rationales for interaction; public co-funding of university-firm interaction (essay II), the role of geographic proximity for interaction on R&D (essay III) and the organisation of public sector research (public research institutes and universities) in relation to firm level competences (essay IV). In a fifth essay, four ideal types of strategy for localised interaction between R&D subsidiaries and universities are proposed. Through the framework developed in this essay, the rationales for interaction are related to the overall R&D strategy of multinational firms. Concluding the thesis, it is discussed how the research presented herein opens up for improved theorizing around the roles of academic research for industrial innovation.