Towards a New Facet of Social Proximity : The Effect of Failed Project Applications on Organizations’ Collaborative Behavior in R&D Networks

Prior engagement between partners is a well-established antecedent of tie formation in interorganizational networks, and it is frequently operationalized in the context of successful collaborations that have received financial support. In reality, in competitive publicly-funded R&D networks, many partnerships never materialize into actual collaborations and are rejected in the application stage. Yet, we know very little about how failed applications shape organizations’ collaborative behavior and the R&D network as a whole. In this paper we investigate to what extent joint experience in rejected project applications influences tie formation, and how this relationship plays out for partners with different levels of cognitive proximity. The empirical analysis is based on a policy-induced collaborative network of both approved and rejected R&D projects in the Spanish region of Valencia in the 2016-2022 time period. Results indicate that joint experience in failed applications exerts a positive influence on future tie formation, and a stronger one than joint experience in successful applications. Moreover, the propensity of actors to re-engage following a rejection, is greater when they are cognitively distant. On a broader level, the study demonstrates, rather critically, that in the absence of information on rejected projects, empirical studies may end up overestimating the effect of prior collaborative experience