The impact and effectiveness of policies to support collaboration for R&D and innovation

This paper is part of the Compendium of Evidence on the Effectiveness of Innovation Policy Intervention. It examines the evidence on the effectiveness of publicly supported schemes that aim to promote or enhance collaborative innovation activities between firms and, what may broadly be termed, the science base – i.e. public laboratories and research institutes and Higher Education Institutions, particularly universities. It bases its analysis on number of evaluation reports and the academic literature. The evidence reviewed is organised around the issues of input additionality, output additionality, behavioural additionality and programme design and governance. It also discusses five important thematic issues including the evaluation of the Alvey Programme, evaluations of the EUREKA Programme, Japanese experience with collaborative R&D support, CIS based evaluations of collaboration, and finally, a series of evaluations of Australia’s Cooperative Research Centres Programmes. The report proposes a set of general lessons for the design and implementation of collaborative support instruments, i.e. the typical pre-conditions for success. Programme success is also found to be closely aligned with the characteristics of the participants. The report also has important conclusions for programme governance while a final set of conclusions relates to lessons for evaluation and future research needs