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

The aim of this paper is to explore the heterogeneity in R&D collaborations and of their determinants and motives. Using a recent French survey on research and innovation relations, we first show the heterogeneity of such relations thanks to a typology of their characteristics: their nature (common research, sub-contracting, multi-partnership, management of a common structure), organizational arrangement (contract, specific investments), duration and type of research (market-oriented vs. research-oriented). Five categories of collaborations are obtained from different combinations of these relational characteristics. Using a multinomial logit estimation (and testing for the IIA assumption), we then try to explain how this diversity of partnerships is related to a broad set of explanatory variables (economic rationale for the cooperation, knowledge spillovers, appropriability conditions and partners’ individual characteristics). Thanks to this original approach, we have obtained new results on R&D cooperation motives.