Cooperative Research Relationships With Industry

We must all hang together or surely we will all hang separately. Benjamin Franklin The significant apathy that characterized relationships between indus try and universities and the adversarial nature of relationships between industry and government have both faded rapidly in the 1980s as the realities of global competition have surfaced in the United States. Both industry and government leaders articulate a number of constructs for regaining our competitiveness in world markets. One of the more fre quent strategies prescribed in this new competitiveness era is cooperation. Different individuals or groups may espouse different definitions, inter pretations, or areas of emphasis, but the overall importance of this concept is substantial. Although examples of cooperative research have existed for several decades, the number and variety of relationships have expanded rapidly in the 1980s as corporations, universities, and governments have embraced this strategy. Joint ventures involving two or three firms increased from under 200 per year in the 1970s to over 400 per year by the mid-1980s. Multiple-firm cooperative arrangements are a more recent phenomenon, made possible by the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984. By mid- 1988,81 of these industry-level consortia had formed under the provisions of the 1984 Act. The rapid growth in cooperative research and development (R&D) is primarily a response to the pressures of international competition. As a corporate strategy, cooperative R&D meets short-term needs for assets to implement new approaches for coping with intensifying competition.

At a time when scientific and technical innovation now requires a multitude of heterogeneous inputs and expertise from the public and private sectors alike, cooperative research centers (CRCs) have emerged as the predominant vehicle for cross-sector collaboration. In the U.S. alone, there are thousands of CRCs on university campuses, and agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and more recently the Department of Energy fund CRCs to address some of the nation’s most formidable challenges with science and technology, including cancer and other diseases, terrorism surveillance and the detection of weapons of mass destruction, and new energy technologies and smart energy grid development. Industry oftentimes participates in CRCs for access to knowledge, capacity development, and to mitigate risk. This volume includes research investigating CRCs from North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia to explore the dynamics of CRCs, including but not limited to resource allocation, structure, level of sponsorship, organization and membership, management and operations, objectives and goals, and in doing so identifies both differences and similarities across institutional and national contexts. The volume sheds light on the role of CRCs in promoting innovation, S&T policy, and economic development, and on the practical aspects of successful CRC management. Moreover, the works included in the volume consider the implications for the various stakeholder groups (firms, universities, researchers, students, policymakers) invested in CRCs.