ابعاد مختلف دانش در پروژه های "تحقیق و توسعه" مشارکتی دانشمندان دانشگاه

An increasing speed of new knowledge generation and a growing specialization of individuals in specific fields make cooperative R&D projects indispensable to stay abreast of the latest technological developments. However, studies targeting this field of research have almost exclusively focused on industrial cooperation projects, neglecting the importance of academic R&D collaboration. We attempt to address this research gap by investigating completed R&D cooperation projects of 376 German professors of the chemical and biological sciences. Based on their evaluation, we can distinguish between successful and less successful projects mainly involving explicit or tacit knowledge. We further characterize these groups by identifying significant group differences regarding trust, the interdependency between partners, the frequency of communication and the closeness of partners. Overall, our study presents new empirical evidence that the codification of knowledge plays an important role for the success of cooperative R&D projects.

An increasing speed of new knowledge generation leads to a growing specialization of individuals in specific fields and subfields of knowledge (Berends et al., 2006). This development makes cooperative R&D projects an indispensable instrument to stay abreast of the latest technological trends—especially in R&D intensive fields, such as the chemical or biotechnological sector (Carayannopoulos and Auster, 2010). Against this background, cooperation represents an important way of sourcing external knowledge. While industrial R&D often emphasizes the “D” and focuses on incremental innovations (e.g. improving the efficiency of production facilities), academic institutions emphasize the “R”, concentrating on basic research. Looking at the innovation process, academic research can thus be placed in front of the front end. While the front end usually starts with the first consideration of an opportunity (Kim and Wilemon, 2002), basic research is not performed with a specific opportunity or application in mind (Bade et al., 2007). Cooperation with academia can thus aid in the search for new inventions and provide important stimuli for developing radical innovations (Fabrizio, 2009 and Todtling et al., 2009), especially when a broad range of external sources is taken into consideration (Chiang and Hung, 2010).

In our paper, we set out to analyze differences in successful and less successful R&D cooperation projects of academic scientists, with a special focus on the role of different dimensions of knowledge. To this end, we asked university professors from the chemical and biological sciences to evaluate their last completed cooperative R&D project. More specifically, we investigated in how far successful and less successful projects mainly involving tacit or explicit knowledge differ in regard to trust, dependency, frequency of communication and closeness of partners.