A morphology of Japanese and European corporate research networks

Institutions performing research often collaborate with each other, and firms are no exception. In recent years, research laboratories have been collaborating more frequently; again, firms are no exception to this trend. In this paper, the extent of corporate research collaboration is measured by counting jointly authored papers published by 34 major European and Japanese firms in the pharmaceuticals, chemical-pharmaceuticals and electronics sectors. In our analysis, we first examine the changing research output of the companies during the 1980s using scientific publications as an indicator of research capability. We then compare the patterns of research collaboration by the companies. We find that European firms collaborated on 52% of their papers in 1989, up from 31% in 1980. For Japanese firms, the figures are lower - 33% in 1989 compared with 22% in 1980. Thus, there is a gap and a growing divergence between the rates of collaboration for European and Japanese firms. The explanation seems to be the increasing intra-European collaboration by European firms, and a striking growth in collaboration with domestic universities by European electronics companies. These differing collaborative patterns give some indication of the sources of technical opportunities available to firms in Europe and Japan.