| dc.description.abstract | We investigate the role of government-affiliated intermediary organizations (GAIO) as a policy intervention for ‘orchestrating’ the Dutch public-private research collaboration network in the years 2013-2016. GAIO are type of innovation intermediaries of which very little is known in literature, despite their assumed relevance in facilitating innovation. Our key hypothesis is that GAIO do not only directly stimulate new partnership formation, but also alter the natural collaboration tendencies of firms as described by the proximities theory (Boschma, 2005). We test this by analysing an unexplored database of public-private R&D collaborations in the Netherlands, where in 2013 the Topconsortia for Knowledge and Innovation (TKI) have been implemented as industry-specific GAIO to facilitate the formation of public-private research consortia. The TKI were introduced as part of the national innovation policy, the “Topsector approach”.
Results indicate that firms who are both members of the same GAIO at t0 have an up to three times higher probability to form a new partnership together at t1 than firms who are members of different GAIO at t0. Cognitive proximity is a significant influencer of new partnership formation, but only when firms do not share membership of a GAIO. This indicates that GAIO are able to overcome the hurdle that cognitive distance poses for new collaborations to arise, allowing for knowledge recombination to occur over larger cognitive distances. Contrary to previous empirical evidence, social proximity has shown to be more relevant within subgroups of GAIO members than between them. This indicates that GAIO exacerbate the natural tendencies of firms to act locally in their embedded networks and preferentially collaborate with their partners’ partners. Lastly, an important finding is that GAIO mostly facilitate large firms to form new partnerships, preferentially with each other and to a lesser extent also with SME. Collaboration amongst SME is also enhanced, but to a lesser extent.
This study provides the first quantitative empirical evidence on GAIO, providing a stronger foundation for their role. From a policy perspective, it appears that GAIO can play an important role in connecting firms over relatively large cognitive distance, that were otherwise unlikely to collaborate. At the same time however, the GAIO are also constrained to some extent by the borders of the specific industrial sector they were assigned to. | |
