ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that many regard cooperation among enterprises and organizations for relatively "basic" research as being even more important than in the applied case. In Japan's case, once the leading firms had caught up technologically in most fields related to computers and telecommunications, they were faced with the need to do far more basic research in order to advance the frontiers of technology than they had ever been required to do up to that point. As in the case of applied research, the technological reasons for cooperation may stem from either the need to combine different types of expertise or the need to have a large number of researchers working on several different approaches. The intra-industry "basic" cooperative research is the form of cooperation that has drawn the most attention internationally, even though in the total realm of cooperative research practices it is the exception, rather than the rule.
