Collaboration and organizational learning: a study of a New Zealand collaborative research program

Collaboration with a research partner is one strategy that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) can pursue to counter their size-imposed research and development (R&D) resource and capacity constraints and to enhance the ir learning. The Technology for Business Growth (TBG) program supports coll aborative R&D projects between New Zealand industry and research institutio ns. This research attempted to gauge the effects of participation in a coll aborative project on broader aspects of organizational learning, on the ind ustry managers' subsequent attitudes towards R&D, as well as managers' perc eptions of success and failure factors for collaboration. The majority of m anagers stated that their attitude to R&D had not changed (it was already p ositive prior to the project). However, their organizations' attitude towar ds the management of R&D projects had often changed, with many companies ad opting the practices of project evaluation and planning enforced by the TBG application process, thus providing considerable evidence that organizatio nal learning had taken place. Objective measures of subsequent R&D activity , such as increased spending on, and number of, R&D projects and increased employment of technical staff provide further evidence that the companies' learning experiences with collaborative projects may have encouraged them t o invest more readily in R&D.