ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed the emergence and widespread growth of new organizational forms to conduct R&D, which we refer to as research partnerships. These partnerships involve firms, universities, non-profit organizations, and public agencies. The growth in such alliances can be attributed to the expansion of public-private partnerships, relaxation of antitrust enforcement to promote collaborative research, policies designed to stimulate more rapid diffusion of technologies from universities to firms, and growth in venture-capital investment in high technology start-ups. These alliances constitute potential sources of R&D spillovers and economic growth, as illustrated in Figure 8.2 and in Table 8.4, and thus, have important policy implications.
