Firms' Cooperative Innovation: Choice Of Mode And Design Of Organization

For a long time cooperative innovation has become an important problem that firmer and economists focus on. There are many benefits of cooperation, such as realizing scale of economy, avoiding duplication of research efforts, internalizing spillovers of technology, accessing to partners'know-how, overcoming cost of R&D barriers. The idea of cooperation is widely accept by people.But firms face many risks during cooperative innovation. A number of empirical evidences show that half of cooperative innovations are unsuccessful. Because of asymmetric information between member firms, uncertainty and complexity of innovation and incomplete contract, moral hazard and adverse selection problems, such as free ride of member firms, are very common during cooperation. These risks are main reasons why cooperative innovation end up a failure.In the early days economists focus on firms'cooperative motives and explore the problem of"why to cooperate"; now,"how to cooperate"becomes a hot problem of economists are interested in."How to cooperate"includes two main problems: firstly, selection of cooperative mode; Secondly, designation of organizational mechanism under certain cooperative mode. Selection of cooperative mode is the core problem we study in this paper. Our study based the stylized fact: considerable empirical studies find that non-equity cooperative mode such as technology cross-licensing agreements are more used than equity mode such as research joint ventures. We have the following specific problems to study:...