Forschungs- und Entwicklungskooperationen: Eine ökonomische Einführung

Successful innovations are of great importance for progress and prosperity and are therefore an important concern for companies, research institutions and politicians alike. However, the knowledge required for the development and marketing of inventions (i.e. innovations) is often spread across different companies and/or spans the specialist areas of several people. In addition, the increasing scientific and technological differentiation means that although the fields of knowledge are becoming deeper, they are also becoming less broad, so that even within specialist disciplines and sectors, more interfaces are needed to bring the partial services back together. This inevitably leads to the need to bring together knowledge that is distributed across different players. Cooperation between companies, research institutions and their members is therefore an essential prerequisite for successful innovation in knowledge-intensive areas. The structuring of such collaborations entails a number of economic and legal challenges, in the solution of which the structuring of research and development contracts plays a central role.