New Organizational Arrangements for Public-Private Research Collaboration

Abstract

This paper studies Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) as organizational platforms for Targeted Open Innovation. Specifically, the concept of Targeted Open Innovation is used to interpret the engagement of firms with other stakeholders within an innovation ecosystem in order to better collaborate and share their knowledge. The paper analyses the funding structure of CRCs in Spain using a sample of 123 CRCs. We aim to determine the effect of the degree of intersectoral collaboration on the CRCs’ funding portfolio. We characterised CRCs—“market-oriented”, “academic-oriented” and “government-oriented”—according to the degree of involvement of each sectoral actor in diverse organisational aspects, setting their objectives, executing the R&D and establishing the managerial processes and evaluation practices. We find that CRCs with market-oriented characteristics rely less on public competitive funds and CRCs with academic-oriented characteristics have a more diversified funding portfolio.