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Explaining the growth of strategic R&D alliances by European firms
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Narula, Rajneesh |
| Copyright Year | 1998 |
| Abstract | This paper first develops an explanation for the increasing popularity of strategic technology alliances, both globally, and by EU firms. It then evaluates, using data over the period 1980-1994, how private, nonsubsidised cooperative agreements in R&D by EU firms has evolved, paying particular attention to the growth of intra-EU activity relative to extra-EU agreements (i.e., EU-US and EU-Japan alliances). Essentially, EU firms’ partnering habits reflect the need to seek strong partners regardless of nationality within a given industry, although intra-EU partnering enjoyed a brief popularity during the latter half of the 1980s. The single European market (SEM) initiative, through its various stages of economic cooperation until the establishment of the European Union, can arguably be said to be one of the most important socio-economic developments of this century. At the heart of much of this activity has been a belief that cooperation by institutions and firms across the various European countries represents a means by which the technological and economic gap between the US and Europe after the Second World War might be narrowed. As Peterson (1991) has pointed out, although technological collaboration has constantly remained high on the agenda of European policy makers, pan-European R&D activities have only systematically been developed by policy makers since the 1980s. Several initiatives by the European Commission have been implemented over the past two decades in an attempt to bolster the competitiveness of European firms, particularly in high technology sectors. In addition to these Europe-specific changes, though, there have been several changes in the global economy which are generally described under the rubric of 'globalisation'. These developments have also impacted significantly on the growth of cross-border economic activity in general, as well as the increasing popularity of alliance activity in particular. In this paper, we first seek to explain the reasons for the increasing importance of alliance activity, and the growth of a special class of alliances, that of strategic technology partnering (STP) or R&D alliances, paying special attention in our discussion to the role of European integration. In addition, we focus on explaining the need to acknowledge the strategic reasons for their growing popularity, in addition to the cost-minimising ones. Second, we intend to evaluate the extent to which private (i.e., non-subsidised) cooperative agreements in R&D by EU firms has evolved, paying particular attention to the extent to which economic integration and globalisation may have influenced intra-EU activity relative to extra-EU agreements (i.e., EU-US and EU-Japan) over the period 1980-1994. Given the crucial nature of technology development to the competitiveness of firms, we wish to enquire |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/portal/files/1061239/guid-8d003402-33af-46ab-bcd4-85c349ee7da6-ASSET1.0 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
