Cross-sector Cooperation among Scientific Research Groups: Analysing Motives and Barriers

Abstract

Public sector research organisations (PSROs), including universities and government research centres, are driven to collaborate with external partners by a variety of factors. These include external demands for new knowledge (Meyer-Krahmer & Schmoch, 1998; Schartinger et al., 2002) and the need for financing (OECD, 1999; Santoro & Gopalakrishnan, 2000). Both these drivers can generate interdependent relationships (Geisler, 1995). However, the intermingling of such interactions between research organisations and their collaborative partners means that they do not fit in a single specific pattern (Thune, 2007).