Knowledge Procurement Strategy of Firms: Collaboration with Public R&D Institutes

Abstract

The majority of new services are provided to the consumer through several coordinated and contributing agents acting together. This paper is concerned with improving our understanding of firms' knowledge procurement that involves several contributing and coordinated agents. The "distributedness" of knowledge procurement varies in physical proximity and takes a variety of organizational arrangement, and their analysis brings to the fore the significance of firms' strategy tailored to the collaboration with a specific economic agent. Based on our empirical research, the analysis opens up considerations on how firms can effectively procure knowledge from public R&D institutes. In contrast to the case of collaboration with universities, the paper concludes that firms can benefit from collaborating with capable public R&D institutes irrespective of the physical proximities between firms and their partnering institutes