The Management of Cooperative Strategies in R&D and Innovation Programmes

This paper reports on an ESRC-funded project investigating 'the management of cooperative strategies', testing hypotheses drawn largely from (transaction cost) economics using data derived from the investigative methods of social anthropology. Cooperative strategies in a sample of British and French companies were investigated, with a wide range of their contact firms and related institutions being interviewed. The project was part of the ESRC's 'Contracts & Competition' Programme, and the results of the empirical material gathered during the study indicated clearly that the opposition cooperation/competition can not, in any simple way, be regarded as descriptive of the public/private opposition. The study demonstrated, and the paper argues, that the private business sector involves a broad spectrum of collaborative agreements between one company and another, and that a complex range of intermediate possibilities exist between the two notional extremes of markets and hierarchies.