Bruno Cassiman (Universidad de Navarra)

“In Search of Performance Effects of Industry-Science Links”

abstract

We study how firms access basic research and translate this into more valuable technologies. Firms looking to access basic research need to bridge the “gap” between scientific and technology communities before basic research can be translated and used for developing new technologies. This gap is particularly hard to bridge because basic knowledge with an important scientific content is typically more tacit than other types of knowledge. Moreover, the right incentives, resources and environment need to be in place in firms to nurture this background knowledge and effectively translate accessed basic research knowledge into new technologies. Therefore, it is not surprising that it is hard to find direct evidence of the effect of science on technology development at the micro level. The literature has looked at two different mechanisms to bridge this gap between basic research and technology: inventor mobility and cooperative partnerships with universities or research institutions. The seminar will discuss the results of three different papers that analyze three different cases in different environments where firms access basic research covering general engineering (Fraunhofer Institutes), chemistry (Lithium-Ion Batteries) and semiconductor process technology (IMEC). We find that both mechanisms – inventor mobility and cooperative partnerships – matter under different circumstances depending on the type of knowledge and the stage of the technology development.