A Study On The Pattern Selection In Inter-firm R&D Cooperation Based On Learning Capacity

Since the fierce competition among enterprises, the renewal speed of the products and technologies becomes more and more quickly. Innovation cooperation has already become the mainstream economy;more enterprises cooperate to strengthen the resources sharing and the superiority supplementary. The pattern selection of innovation cooperation is the basis and key point during the establishment of stable relationship among cooperative enterprises. Our study of this problem based on the learning capacity and supplied a gap in this area. We pointed out that the learning capacity is one of the most important attributes in their choices and the reason of companies under the same condition choosing different patternsWhen analyzed the affect of learning capacity on the pattern selection of innovation cooperation, we divided the decision-making process of enterprises into two stages: the innovation cooperation and production competition. Meanwhile we divided innovation cooperation patterns into horizontal cooperation and vertical cooperation from the technical relations angle.We find that under certain market environment, as the learning capacity level went downward, the cooperative returns in both two patterns dropped first, and then rises. Besides, for most of the time, the cooperation returns are different at the same learning capacity level. Analyzing the biggest R&D returns under the two cooperation patterns, we find that at lower learning capacity level, cooperation returns under horizontal cooperation pattern is higher than that under vertical cooperation pattern, with the learning capacity gradually enhanced, the superiority of horizontal cooperation reduced, and finally the returns in vertical innovation cooperation was higher than that in horizontal innovation cooperation. Therefore, based on learning capacity, when enterprise's learning capacity is low, they intend to choose horizontal innovation cooperation pattern;while with high learning capacity enterprises are more likely to cooperate in the vertical pattern. At last, we use data from overseas companies as examples to verify our results of study.