Public knowledge partnerships in European research projects and knowledge creation across R&D institutional sectors

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the role of public knowledge partnerships in EU-funded framework programmes (FP) on knowledge creation across a sample of European countries. Different from previous studies, we investigate whether the impact of participation in FP on new knowledge (patents) differs across private companies, universities and public research centres. We find that, while all institutional sectors benefit from joint projects, the main benefits (in terms of patenting activity) go to universities and public research centres, while private companies benefit less. We also find evidence of important complementarities between participation in international research projects and internal innovation drivers (researchers), thus highlighting the crucial role of domestic absorptive capacity for fully benefiting from international cooperation in R&D projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Public–private collaboration
• EU framework programmes
• knowledge creation
• absorptive capacity
• patents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Andrea Fabrizi is Official at the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, Ph.D. at LUISS University (Rome, Italy) in History and Theory of Economic Development, Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Econometrics at The Higher School of Economics and Finance (SSEF, Rome). Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.

Giulio Guarini is Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Tuscia (Viterbo, Italy). Italian National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor in Economics and Economic Policy. Visiting Researcher at University of Nice, France. Ph.D. at Sapienza University of Rome (Italy).

Valentina Meliciani is Professor of Applied Economics at the University Luiss Guido Carli of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Master at the University of Sussex. She has been Visiting Fellow at SPRU (Sussex University), Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Notes

1. By institutional sectors, or R&D institutional sectors, we refer to the four institutional sectors of performance of R&D activities: business enterprise (BES), government (GOV), higher education (HES) and the private non-profit (PNP), that is the overall actors involved in innovative activity (Eurostat 2014). For the purposes of our analysis, and to harmonise Eurostat and Annual Reports of the European Commission (EC) data, we have joined PNP institutions with GOV sector. As well Eurostat in an update of the sector allocation methodology for patent statistics opted for a combination of the previous public and private non-profit institution sectors into a single ‘Government sector or private non-profit’ sector.

2. For empirical analyses using the KPF, see, among others, Hausman, Hall, and Griliches (1984), Hall, Griliches, and Hausman (1986), Blundell, Griffith, and Van Reenen (1999) and Bloom, Schankerman, and Van Reenen (2013) at the industrial and entrepreneurial levels; Jaffe (1989) at the institutional level; Meliciani (2000), Porter and Stern (2000), Bosch, Lederman, and Maloney (2005) and Mancusi (2008) at the national and international levels.

3. Some companies aim to develop ‘fine-packaged patent map’ based on the consideration of comprehensive protection so that their patents will tend to be separated into more detailed content in the relative knowledge domain. In this case, they would produce more ‘small’ patents. We thank an anonymous referee for pointing out clearly the main differences in the strategies of knowledge protection among companies, government and higher education institutions.

4. We decided to adopt the national level (rather than the regional one as in other contributions such as Charlot, Crescenzi, and Musolesi 2014) because the main focus of the paper is on the overall benefits of international public–private partnerships accruing to different R&D institutional sectors and, to the best of our knowledge, there are no available data on patents disaggregated by R&D institutional sectors across European regions.

5. For a recent discussion on patents as innovation indicators, see Nagaoka, Motohashi, and Goto (2010).

6. One concern in inserting in the same regression R&D intensity and the share of researchers on total population is that they might be highly correlated. This does not appear to be a problem in our regressions, where they both show up positive and significant. The correlation coefficient between the two variables is 0.72.

7. In the case of the business sector, due to the higher propensity to patent, we assign the value zero to the dummy variable also for cases in which P_ijt-1≤ 4 and P_ijt≤ 1 which correspond to ‘outliers’ (fifth percentile).

8. See endnote 1 for the construction of three institutional sectors.

9. Over the years, the nomenclature for the organisations type in the Annual Reports has changed, so as to require a harmonisation procedure with Eurostat data for R&D institutional sectors.

10. The total number of participants, excluding Human Resources and Mobility activity was of 65,960 in FP6, compared with more than 75,046 of the FP5. These participants were involved, respectively in 5485 and 12,391 contracts, where a contract corresponds to a funded research project in a given priority area (as Life sciences, genomics and biotechnology for health, Information society technologies and so on, Commission of the European Communities 2008).

11. For FP 2007–2013, data refer to the period 2007–2009. We call the four periods, 1994–1997, 1998–2001, 2002–2006 and 2007–2010, FP4, FP5, FP6 and FP7, respectively, in accordance with EU Framework Programmes nomenclature and their temporal extension.