Attraction & Engagement: Dual Mechanism in National Collaborative R&D Projects

Abstract

In developing countries, government and its research laboratory play an important in guiding the direction of technology development at national level. However, the exact mechanism of how these institutional forces take effects in national collaborative R&D projects is understudied due to the lack of theoretical guidance. Taking the perspective of selection-variation process of technical progress, we argue that while government provide a strong signaling effect to attract other entities into the collaborative R&D projects, government research laboratory play the role of engaging other entities to put more distributed efforts. However, for better project outcome, government and its institutional influence is not the sufficient condition - industry funding and distributed efforts of other entities should supplement the governmental mechanism at the later stage of the project. We provide the empirical support of these arguments by analyzing 5,428 national collaborative R&D projects carried out in Korea. Conc...