Basic research and the success of federal lab-industry partnerships

This paper examines the role that basic research plays in the strategies pursued by industry in their interactions with federal labs. It draws on questionnaire-based data of 229federal laboratory-industry joint R&D projects with 219 companies and 27 laboratories. The study documents the relative importance of basic research in the success of the interactions by comparing the incidence of basic research on several indicators of success. ’ The study shows that, even though projects involving basic research tend to have higher costs, they al o have a high percentage ofproduct outputs in the short term. Typical high payoflstrategies for partnership were those in which the company performed several technical roles and the federal laboratory w s more narrowly focused. lntroduction It is widely believed that basic research is the compo-nent of the knowledge enterprise most distant from com-mercialization. Further, if the research in question were clearly linked to commercial products, it would probably not be classified as “basic ” research. Therefore, when w