research@hec - Issue #35 - (Page 2)

R&D research hec R&D collaboration: How to find the best universityfirm match University scientists and private firms are increasingly keen to engage in joint entrepreneurship, collaborating on research and development to advance knowledge and bring innovations to market. But only when the partners' strengths build up, rather than canceling each other out, will the alliance boost innovation. Denisa Mindruta B iography Denisa Mindruta has been at HEC since 2008, and teaches strategy and technology management. She first studied sociology and mathematics at the University of Bucharest, in Romania, then went on to do an MA in political science at State University New York in the US in 2002. She obtained her Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Illinois in 2009. 2 Everyone has heard about Botox - derived from botulinum toxin - to smooth out wrinkles; but who knows that treatments for migraines, neck muscle spasms and speech impediments were developed from the same lethal neurotoxin? These treatments were the result of a fruitful collaboration between professors at a top US medical school and health care company Allergan - just one example of the many partnerships between academia and the private sector. As Denisa Mindruta points out, there is long-standing evidence that academic research has a significant impact on the productivity of privatesector research and development, as publications are influential channels of knowledge transfer. Unsurprisingly, firms with direct research ties to universities significantly increase their innovative performance. Conversely, scientists are always on the lookout for firms that will move published results towards commercialization. There is a long tradition of such collaboration in the US, Denisa Mindruta explains, citing the example of University of Illinois, where she studied for her Ph.D.: "Universities are more entrepreneurial, they encourage scientists to form start-ups, or 'spin-offs', to get venture capital and commercialize their inventions." But she also sees the trend coming to Europe, where scientists are more and more encouraged to transfer knowledge. * October-November 2013 FINDING THE BEST PARTNER So how can universities and private companies form the most profitable alliances? The factors behind value creation remain underexplored, and Denisa Mindruta decided to study them from a "matching" approach. Economists have typically studied matching - the sorting process in a context of twosided decision-making and competition for better partners - in marriage and labor markets. The researcher examined the matching of scientists and firms, based on the simple premise that scientists care about the quality of the firm and firms care about scientists' research excellence. The interaction of these preferences will lead to a sorting of partners, in other words "better" scientists will team up with "better" firms. But as Denisa Mindruta's research shows, the selection is not made along a linear pecking order, since the process is endogenous, i.e. the choice variables are partly function of other parameters: each party will try to choose a partner whose qualities reinforce their own. To study what drive alliances, the researcher examined collaborations between scientists at a top US medical school and their private-sector partners along three key dimensions, which she figured best reflected the typical strengths of potential partners: publishing capability, patenting capability and knowledge specialization.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of research@hec - Issue #35

Cover & Contents
R&D collaboration: How to find the best university-firm match
Decision-making: Why do we underestimate rare events?
Corporate governance: The independence of top-ranking executives lies at the heart of performance

research@hec - Issue #35