The Emergence of a Small World in a Network of Research Joint Ventures
Alghamdi, Mohamad . 2012
Using the CATI Database of cooperative research and development (R&D) agreements, this paper applies methods from social network theory to study emergence of networks of firms cooperating in research joint ventures (RJVs) during the Twentieth Century. In this paper, a cooperative agreement between firms is modeled as a connecting link in a network, where the nodes of this network represent participating firms. The resulting R&D network is emergent in the sense that individual RJVs are sub-components of a larger network in which many of these RJVs are inter-linked by virtue of the presence of hub firms. This paper shows that the largest growth in the R&D networks occurred during the last three decades of the Twentieth Century, with the largest increase in the R&D collaboration occurring in the chemicals, telecom and modern materials/technology sectors. Based on our analysis of the data, during this period we find that the emergent R&D network has a pattern of collaboration (degree distribution), in which there are a large number of firms with at most one link and small number firms that have a large number of links. Over the same time period our analysis shows that, while statistics such as the clustering component and degree ratio are becoming smaller, the diameter of the network is also decreasing. This indicate that although the network is becoming sparser and more locally clustered, individual firms within this network are closer to each other in terms of the average number of links separating them from other firms. This is due to the presence of highly connected hub firms, which are linked into and collaborating across multiple research joint ventures. It is the presence of these R&D hubs that lead to the emergence of the small world in our emergent R&D network.
The paper investigates the influence of dense collaborative R&D structures between firms as stable standard networks on equilibrium outcomes.
The purpose of the paper is to define the basic conditions on cooperation of firms in research and development (R&D) to guarantee maximum outcomes.
This paper contributes to the empirical study of the cooperation of companies in research and development (R&D). The contribution is based primarily on the…