Cooperative research and development: who participates and in which industries do projects take place?

This article identifies the characteristics of industry categories to which cooperative R&D participants belong and in which cooperative R&D projects occur, while focusing on the systematic linkages between these categories. The analysis is based upon 186 Japanese government-sponsored R&D consortia with 627 participants spanning three decades. The motives for cooperative R &D are found to be analogous to the motives for diversification. The result s show that: firms in profitable or oligopolistic industries are motivated to form cooperative R&D projects in industries which have higher growth rat es than their own industries (except in the 1960s); firms in R&D-intensive industries conduct cooperative R&D projects in order to enter R&D-intensive industries; and, projects tend to be formed in industries which have a str ong vertical relationship with the participants. There is evidence that the se government-sponsored cooperative R&D projects tend to occur in industrie s with a large minimum efficient scale in R&D in the 1970s, though this ten dency is much weaker or non-existent in other decades. There is no evidence that projects tend to occur in industries which have appropriability probl ems. On the contrary, there is evidence in the 1970s that projects were for med in industries with strong appropriability conditions. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.