عوامل مؤثر بر همکاری تحقیق و توسعه موفق در کسب و کارهای کوچک ژاپنی: تاثیر ویژگی های سازمانی و قراردادی

Using original survey data on Japanese small businesses, this paper analyses the impact of the organizational and contractual characteristics of cooperative R&D, such as membership structure, partner relationship, external support, and rules of cost and outcome sharing, on the probability of the technological and commercial success of the project. Empirical results suggest that cooperative R&D is more successful, the higher the quality and quantity of external resources available through cooperation, and the lower the transaction and coordination costs required for such arrangements. Moreover, we found that the determinants of technological and commercial success differ considerably.

Cooperative R&D1 has attracted considerable attention from both academics and practitioners. Important theoretical literature on this subject highlight the following advantages of cooperative R&D: better access to external business resources, achieving economies of scale and scope and synergy effects for R&D, reducing risk and wasteful duplication of R&D efforts, and increased incentive for R&D investment by the reduced appropriability problem (Katz, 1986, d’Aspremont and Jacquemin, 1988, Suzumura, 1992 and Combs, 1993). On the other hand, cooperative R&D is also argued to have the negative effects of welfare loss or reduced R&D efforts if it leads to collusion in R&D and the product market (Jorde and Teece, 1990). Cooperative R&D is a useful way to overcome the lack of internal business resources and to improve innovativeness and competitiveness, particularly for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In fact, as pointed out by Kleinknecht and Reijnen (1992, p. 347), “R&D cooperation does not typically occur between big, high tech firms.” A statistical survey carried out in Japan in 19912 revealed that 9% of SMEs (firms with 50–299 employees)3 in the manufacturing sector were involved in cooperative R&D with other firms (Table 1). Compared to large firms, the ratio of SMEs with cooperative R&D is lower but is still too high to be neglected. It should be noted that, in absolute terms, more SMEs cooperate in R&D than large firms. Moreover, cooperative R&D is not concentrated in a small number of high-tech industries but is found in all manufacturing industries.The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the organizational and contractual features of cooperative R&D on project performance by using original survey data of Japanese SMEs in the manufacturing sector. This paper contributes to the study of cooperative R&D in two major ways. First, few empirical studies have been conducted on the impact of the organizational and contractual characteristics of cooperative R&D thus far.4 Second, previous empirical researches have concentrated on research consortia among large firms and paid relatively slight attention to SMEs. In particular, econometric studies based on Japanese data have primarily focused on government-sponsored research consortia among large corporations (Miyata, 1995, Branstetter and Sakakibara, 1998, Branstetter and Sakakibara, 2002, Sakakibara, 2001a and Sakakibara, 2001b). This study is the first comprehensive empirical study on cooperative R&D projects of Japanese SMEs. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section provides a review of previous empirical literature on the impact of cooperative R&D. Section 3 gives a detailed discussion of the data source and descriptive statistics of sample firms. Due to the lack of detailed information regarding the organizational and contractual features of cooperative R&D projects, especially pertaining to SMEs, it is worth describing the major findings of the survey. In Section 4, we present a basic model and some operational hypotheses for the empirical analysis. Section 5 shows and discusses the results of the analysis, and Section 6 consists of a summary of the main findings along with concluding remarks.

In this paper, we investigated the organizational and contractual features of cooperative R&D of Japanese SMEs based on original survey data and analyzed the determinants of successful cooperation. We used two measures of success: TESUCCESS (project outcomes were applied for patents or utility models) and COSUCCESS (project outcomes contributed to sales growth). Particular attention was paid to the role of membership structure and supporting partners, degree of organizational formality, as well as the rules of sharing costs and outcomes. A number of studies have investigated cooperative R&D; however, neither the organizational structure of cooperation nor the effects of these features on project performance have been investigated and analyzed in detail. Moreover, this is the first econometric analysis pertaining to Japanese SMEs. The basic idea of this research is that the organizational and contractual features of the cooperative project affect the success of the project. The results of the regression analyses generally support this. It should be noted that the probability of commercial success of the project is positively influenced by cooperation with business partners but negatively influenced by cooperation with universities and public research institutes. The results also provide evidence that the technological success of cooperative R&D depends on the combination of the rules of cost and outcome sharing. Specifically, the project is more likely to be successful when the costs and outcomes are shared according to technological capability and contribution, respectively. Moreover, we found that, as a whole, the determinants of technological and commercial success of cooperative R&D are almost entirely different. Note that, however, this research focuses on SMEs, and therefore the results cannot be directly applied to large firms. Our empirical results suggest as a whole that cooperative R&D projects should be designed to provide the participants with optimum access to complementary external resources on the one hand and to reduce transaction and coordination costs on the other hand, by inducing higher incentive and commitment of the participants and preventing free-riding. To sum up the most important results, we would emphasize that whether or not cooperative R&D is successful depends on the structure and contents of the cooperation. The optimal design of cooperative projects depends on the goals of cooperation (Belderbos et al., 2004). Cooperation with large firms and familiar firms in other industries is more likely to contribute to technological success, while cooperation with many firms and business partners without public subsidy is favorable for commercial success. Firms can select an optimal pattern for the cooperative project based on their aims (patents, new products or process, etc.) and conditions (internal resources, technological characteristics of the industry, etc.). In this analysis, the organizational and contractual characteristics are regarded as exogenous but they can also be determined endogenously. However, this issue exceeds the scope of this paper and is left for further research.29 In conclusion, some factors that are not covered in this research should be mentioned as areas for future research. First, the characteristics of the technological field of cooperative R&D may affect both the organization and performance of the project. Such characteristics were not explicitly considered in our questionnaire, though they have been partly controlled for with industry dummies. Future research should focus on a specific industry or technology.30 Second, and related to the first point, the technological proximity of cooperating partners may also play an important role in determining project success (Branstetter and Sakakibara, 1998 and Sakakibara and Branstetter, 2003). Third, project success may also depend on the closeness of the subject of cooperative R&D to in-house R&D (Caloghirou et al., 2003). Fourth, the geographical proximity of the participants may also be an important factor in project success (Mora-Valentin et al., 2004). Finally, aims, membership, and the organizational and contractual structure of the cooperative project may change over time. In our research, we implicitly assumed that the project characteristics – particularly the organizational and contractual structure – are determined at the beginning of the project and remain unchanged over time. To address this issue, the dynamic process of cooperation should be considered explicitly (Cf. Reuer et al., 2002 and Dvir and Lechler, 2004).