Whenever companies engage in collaboration with external partners, there is always a risk that vital knowledge can exit the business. Research from the University of Texas at Austin highlights how partnerships with universities can actually increase protection against such leakage occurring.
The researchers explain that while firms reap significant benefits from the innovations that often arise from partnering with universities, the fact that academics usually wish to publish their work in academic journals can raise fears that the secret sauce will be exposed to the wider world.
Balancing the risk
The researchers believe there are ways that this risk can be managed, however, with this especially so if there is a frequent collaboration with their internal company colleagues. This is because the internal collaborations create a kind of knowledge protection effect due to the spread of information across a range of labs and teams. This results in a higher barrier for any external rival to overcome if they want to gain a full understanding of the innovation.
Such an approach can be an effective hedge against any leakage risks, especially as academics prefer to publish their research publicly, so patent protection is less effective.
“Although we tend to celebrate the benefits of collaboration, collaboration is a two-way avenue,” the researchers explain. “That’s because knowledge produced by universities becomes openly accessible. Internal collaborations can protect the knowledge of the company.”
Fruitful collaboration
The researchers examined the creative collaborations of 157 pharma companies that had each released new drugs into the market between 1980 and 2004. They used data from the Web of Science to identify when each company had co-authored scientific papers with universities.
The level of internal collaboration within organizations was then measured by examining data on the successful patent applications for each firm. These documents show the number of inventors involved in each project as well as their location. The results show that internal collaboration across various locations coincided with more research papers published with university researchers.
“These companies are more inclined to engage in research partnerships with universities because their knowledge is protected,” the authors conclude. “These findings can also be applied to industries outside the pharmaceutical sector. Through internal collaboration, companies can mitigate their risk while still reaping the benefits of partnering with universities in research.”
