The governance structure in the R&D networks: A comparative approach (original) (raw)
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Engagement in innovation networks can increase a company's innovation potential more than by only exploiting its own R&D resources. Theory has recognized innovation networks' increasing importance by investigating their single components and their relation to others. But in order to help the practice to decide when, and in which form of innovation networks, engagement is needed, and when it is better to cut ties to prevent resources from being wasted, performance monitoring from an individual company perspective is needed. The empirical background for this research was a six-month investigation of a well-established European innovation network for research on radiation dosimetry. This network aims to advance the scientific understanding of ionizing radiation dosimetry to promote dosimetric methods and instruments' technical development as well as their implementation in routine dosimetry, and to ensure the consistency of the dosimetric procedures used within the EU as well as compliance with international guidelines. This network consists of 47 European organizations in 31 different countries. The member organizations range from small to big laboratories (e.g., CERN in Switzerland), or research institutions (Institute of Nuclear Physics, Poland) to governmental institutions for radiation protection (National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment, Italy) to companies that produce and sell dosimetric tools (ARC Seibersdorf Research, Austria). Beside the member organizations, which have different expectations regarding the value of and need for a network, other stakeholder like the European Commission and the governments of the single countries, which fund part of the network's activities, want a certain innovation outcome. These different perspectives make monitoring and demonstrating the network outcome increasingly complex. We are going to investigate the network and measure as well as illustrate its outcome for the different stakeholders in a three-year project. In the article, we present the performance indicators' first findings, based on interviews and questionnaires as well as on site visits and document analysis conduced in the first six months of the research project.
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n research and development (R&D) alliances, the partner firms must balance the tension between knowledge sharing and knowledge leakages because knowledge sharing, designed to support the alliance's technology development goals, can often lead to unintended and potentially damaging knowledge leakages. Governance structure is a well-understood knowledge protection strategy designed to reduce knowledge leakage concerns and thereby encourage desired knowledge transfers in two-party R&D alliances. Whether governance structure can be an important balancing mechanism for R&D alliances with multiple partner firms, or multilateral R&D alliances, however, requires further study. Because increasing the number of alliance partners introduces additional complexities to managing an alliance, the appropriate governance mechanism for a multilateral R&D alliance is likely to differ from that for a bilateral alliance. Drawing insights from social exchange theory, we explore governance decisions in multilateral R&D alliances. First, we examine the potential for variance between multilateral and bilateral R&D alliances in governance decisions as a means of knowledge sharing and knowledge protection. Results based on our analysis of 2,423 R&D alliances, 1,690 bilateral and 733 multilateral, are consistent with predictions drawn from social exchange theory. We next focus on three-partner R&D alliances, or trilateral R&D alliances, and compare governance mechanisms between two types of trilateral R&D alliances: chain and net. We find that equity governance structures are more likely to be used in net-based than in chain-based trilateral R&D alliances; we also find that alliance scope moderates the relationship between the type of alliance and governance structure. Finally, we find that multilateral R&D alliances with predicted (aligned) governance structures perform better, in terms of alliance longevity, than those with misaligned structures.
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