Forms and Determinants of R&D Collaborations: Evidence Based on French Data

The literature on R&D collaboration highlights a broad set of rationales for allying with other organizations. At the same time, it has been reported that there exists a large variety of forms of collaboration. Nevertheless, the relation between the motives to collaborate and the different forms of collaboration has not been examined. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by highlighting and explaining the heterogeneity in the forms of collaboration as a result of several interdependent simultaneous choices. Using a sample of more than 3,000 R&D collaborations, a typology of their characteristics allows us to distinguish five discrete forms of collaboration. Then using a multinomial logit estimation, we show how the forms of collaboration vary according to the firms' attributes (size, R&D internal effort, group membership), market and objectives pursued. We also obtain new results on the effects of incoming spillovers as well as appropriability conditions.