عوامل تعیین کننده در موفقیت پروژه های "تحقیق و توسعه": شواهدی از اتحاد تحقیقات آمریکا و اسرائیل

Until 1997, a basic premise of Israeli R&D support programs had been the principle of neutrality—all eligible projects were funded. With a binding budget constraint, the government had to select the projects it funded and thus to depart from neutrality. An optimal departure would favor those projects that have less of a chance to succeed without support. In this paper, I examine the performance of government supported collaborative research projects. I find that size and organizational form affect the probability of technical success and duration to commercialization in a way that suggests departing from neutrality by preferring less established firms.

A basic premise of Israeli R&D support programs has been the principle of neutrality (Trajtenberg, 2001). According to this principle, projects were selected not according to any discriminating criteria but solely on eligibility considerations such as technical feasibility. In particular, firms or projects were not distinguished by characteristics such as size or type of ownership. In 1997, for the first time, the demand for government funds for R&D exceeded the budget allocated by the Israeli Government. The recent crisis in high-technology industries and the resulting decline in venture capital financing have exacerbated the problem, increasing the demand for government funding even further. In the presence of a binding budget constraint, government agencies are forced to select the projects they fund. Any selection criterion imposed on the set of eligible projects represents a departure from neutrality. Since 1997, however, ad hoc solutions have been the only response to this fundamental shift in market conditions. While public and academic discussions are on-going (Teubal, 1999 and Trajtenberg, 2001), a change in policy is still pending.

In this paper, I employ data on American–Israeli research alliances to investigate the success of R&D projects. I develop, and test, two sets of hypotheses relating the size and organizational form of an alliance to technical success and the timing of commercialization. I first use information on applicants to analyze project approval decisions and then, building on outcomes of the approval analysis, I correct for selection bias that may affect performance in subsequent stages. I find that both size and organizational form affect the probability of technical success and duration to commercialization. Specifically, the probability of technical success increases when (1) duration of the project increases, (2) firms are related through ownership, and (3) firms possess complementary abilities. Given technical success, the time to commercialization decreases when (1) project budget increases, (2) revenue of the larger firm in the alliance increases, and (3) firms are related through ownership. My findings link the size of the project and of the participating firms and the nature of organization of the research alliance to project performance. These findings may be useful to both designers of R&D policy and policy evaluators.