ABSTRACT

It is common knowledge that R&D co-operation has been on the increase in recent years together with theoretical and empirical arguments as to its value and public policies actively promoting it. Cooperation between producers and users is perhaps only part of the relevant scholarly and policy domains, but it is certainly a central one. In the policy domain, such co-operation is often linked to the promotion of diffusion of new technologies in manufacturing industries. In scholarly quarters, such cooperation is seen as taking place under ideal conditions (Lundvall 1988; Georghiou et al. 1990), where the behaviour of the partners is either selfregulated by trust or fear of acquisition, or regulated by carefully drafted consortium agreements. In practice, R&D cooperation between producers and users has benefits as well as pitfalls. For example, authors have expressed concern over the possibilities for technological leakages, differences in the level of commitment between individual partners, and the potential for competition after the project has finished (Nueno and Ostervald 1988; Buisseret 1993). The potential for competition is seen in terms of the co-operating firms producing the same products or close substitutes after the project. This chapter aims to illuminate another aspect of competitive behaviour between partners during the R&D projects, the terms of which are set by analysis of the links between technology and competitive advantage.