COLLABORATION BETWEEN RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS AND BUSINESS SECTOR – CASE OF TRANSITION COUNTRIES

Creating knowledge – based economy, stimulating innovations and investments in human capital have been defined as priorities in most of the national development strategies today. In this context, stimulating continuous collaboration between research institutions and businesses is of key importance and it is mostly visible in R&D area.

The effects of these R&D alliances are the most prominent in R&D intensive and high-tech industries, in sectors charactarized by continual technology changes and high level of technology development (e.g. pharmaceuticals and aerospace). Namely, although universities are nowdays more knowledge brokers than ivory towers as they used to be (Gassmann et al., 2010), a small number of companies include them into their innovation activities. Generally, their involvement in firm’s innovative outputs is concentrated in science-based industrial sectors. Moreover, the flow of knowledge from universities and research institutions is mainly related to the product innovations. This type of R&D collaboration is often associated with radical innovations – introduction of new products and technologies (Mohnen and Hoareau, 2002) mostly in manufacturing firms. In line with this, Lööf and Broström (2008) analyzed impacts of collaboration with universities on company’s innovation performances. This analysis was based on data obtained from Community Innovation Survey (CIS) III in Sweden conducted in the year of 2001 for 2114 firms from both manufacturing and service sectors. They found that university collaboration has a positive impact on large manufacturing firms in terms of innovation sales and propensity to apply for patents.

Even though transition officialy ended for countries that are now full members of EU, for some countries it is often stated that transition is still „work in progress.“ With fulfillment of conditions for EU membership transition process for Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries has completed. However, authors Halasz (2007) and Birzea (2008) argue that these countries are now in a period of “New transition”, referring to transition to knowledge – based economy. High performance of most transition countries with respect to primary and secondary education on the other side, lack of innovation, high unemployment, brain drain, low competiveness etc. (EBRD, 2014) are some of the current issues in these countries.

Main aim of this paper is to analyse state of R&D collaboration between research institutions and business sector in european transition countries. Main practical implications of this study lies in the emphasizing the importance of collaboration, R&D alliences as a factor of economic development and competitivness improvement.