留学生essay代写精选范文：“Relationship between company and scientific research institution”，这篇论文讨论了公司与科研机构的关系。不知道大家知不知道，其实现在很多科研机构是由公司和政府机构合作而成立的。一些比较出名的企业科研机构，如贝尔实验室和IBM的实验室，都已经改变到了人们的生活方式。然而，这些科研机构也是一把双刃剑，既能给公司带来收益，也会让公司面临损失。
People know that scientific research is also conducted by numerous firms as well as government institutions. However, seldom people understand the motivation for firms to link with scientific research and how the firms build the linkage. Most of them just take it as granted. This paper is going to reveal the firm’s motivations to link with scientific research and describe some major linking form between firm and scientific research. The source of scientific research is various, but the author has identified that it is crucial for firm to connect with its innovative source in an appropriate form. The paper will analyze the factors that should be considered when choosing the right form and a useful decision model will be demonstrate at last. The outcome of this paper helps readers to understand more about the relationship between firms and scientific research and will be helpful for decision making in real business situation.
Firms have been linking with scientific research for more than one hundred years. Some famous corporate laboratories such as Bell Laboratory and IBM Laboratory do have changed people’s way of living. Corporate Lab used to be the most common form taken by firms to link with scientific research in the past decades. However, this “do-it-yourself” mentality of closed innovation strategy no longer works well in some industries. More and more firms, under the pressure of high cost and high risk, are shifting from closed innovation strategy to an open strategy in order to seek innovations from external source (Herzog, 2008). For example, cooperate with universities. Universities focus on the basic research and firms in charge of applied research to put the findings from university to practical point which has a market needs. It is a truth that firms are less interested in basic research than before, because they think basic research is a luxury activity in today’s fierce market competition. US Firms’ basic research cost is decreased from 6 percent (percentage of sales) in1988 to 1.8 percent in 1992(Corcoran, 1994).To a further extend than cooperation, the new trend of outsourcing scientific research to other companies or institutes is the evidence that firms are really heavy pressure in the marketplace, they need more flexible and more cost-effective scientific research activities.
However, different forms for firms to link with scientific research have their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, outsourcing scientific research may relief the corporate financial pressure but it is likely to trigger fraud or achievement steal if contract law and intellectual property protection are weak in the society. For large corporations, inadequate linkage with scientific research squeezes the company’s profit; for small to medium companies, inappropriate linkage could directly send the company to bankruptcy. As linking with scientific research in an inappropriate way could be the inducement to business failure, this study will help managers understand more about the links and make the right decisions. The study will first explain why firms want to link with scientific research and analyze the link forms that firms adopt currently, and then have insight on the factors that should be considered by managers when deciding the company’s link form to scientific research. At last, a decision model will derived.
Numerous previous works argue that scientific research could increase the rate of technological advance, which will boost economic growth. So, it is a social need that companies should link with scientific research. However, we are not going to dig it in a macro view here. We will discuss the reasons in a micro view- firms’ stance.
There are several perspectives in explaining why firms link with scientific research. One widely supported perspective is that it is the firm’s need for innovative search that makes firm link with scientific research. The innovative search includes searching for new product idea, new forms of organization and solutions to existing problems (Stuart and Podolny, 1996; Koput, 1997; Katila, 2002; Katila and Ahuja, 2002; Mahdi, 2003). In terms of the firms’ basic motivation, firms need innovative activities to shape out better products, better services or better organizations to deliver superior value to their customer in order to generate above-average return. This perspective perfectly matched firms’ motivations because the innovative search process, in a deeper sight, can be viewed as a vital capability which helps companies sustaining their competitive advantages (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). Base on the argument of innovation search process, Fleeming and Sorenson(2004) argued that invention could also be combinations of search process and scientific research could lead firms more directly to useful combinations, eliminating fruitless research directions and motivate firms to continue even the temporary result is negative. This function becomes most significant when firms’ innovations are relying on complex combination of numerous components. Another argument was raised by March (1991), as the growth of a firm is determined by what resource the firm has and how adequate and effective does the firm uses them (Penrose, 1959), firms need to balance its resources on knowledge exploitation and knowledge exploration.
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Knowledge exploitation refers to exploit existing technologies to develop product and make profit. But in today’s competing environment, existing technologies will not be long duration. Just like the example that VCD become quickly replaced by proliferated DVD, existing technologies will quickly be obsolete when new breakthrough technologies come out and delivers added value. So, competitive firms are wise to link with scientific research to balance knowledge exploration, thereby keeping their technology state-of- the-art in their market niche. Besides, the investment perspective says firms view their linkage with scientific research as an investment and most of them prefer applied research than basic research (Rosenberg, 1990). Basic research consist so many uncertainties and require a very long period to bring financial return even if achievement is made, firms normally cannot accept its high risk and long payoff time (Rosenberg, 1990). It is obvious that those firms who regularly invest on basic research are usually in a strong monopoly or oligopoly situation in their industry, they have sufficient capital and could easily transfer the uncertainty and cost to consumers because of slight competition. So, most firms under competitive market prefer applied research as short-term or moderate-term investment while basic research, in most of the time, are supported by governments of highly industrialized countries(Gersbach, Schneider and Schneller,2010)
Running private corporate labs was the most popular form firms used to link with scientific research. It is an internal link that firms link with innovative activities by building up a new entity branch and strongly control it within its organization structure. In this form, long-term objective is normally emphasized. Managers could easily control the researchers and research activities to meet the company’s strategy. According to internalization theory (Buckley and Casson, 1976), corporate lab could also decrease multinational enterprises’ transaction cost to acquire technological improvement and manage corporate knowledge. Besides, a closed innovation strategy may provide best intellectual property protection mechanism. Firms could choose to keep the research achievement as a business secret and no one else outside the laboratory knows it, which sometime works much better than registering a patent.
However, in these days, corporate labs are no longer as influential as before. Bell labs, for example, wined 6 Nobel Prize in the past decades, struggled from researcher departure and financial pressure in recent year, finally this famous corporate lab pulled out from basic scientific research and turned entirely towards applied research in order to survive its parent company-AT&T. (Brumfiel, 2008). The lab reached the lowest point in 2003 when only around 1000 researchers and 115 million USD budget, compared with 25,000 researchers and billions of budget half a century ago(Schmidt, 2007). Under financial pressure, corporate lab researchers are forced to change their motivation from prize-winning to commercialization, which cause a number of excellent researchers return to academic institutions.
Today, less and less firms merely rely on corporate labs to link with scientific research. For most firms, the benefit of closed innovation strategy is prevailed by its weakness. The high cost of running corporate labs and the increasing market competition lead the firms to search innovation from external source. Also, business secrets sometimes are not easy to be kept in the Information Era. The increased value of patent and completed law system provides a good reason for firms to adopt an open innovation strategy. Industrial firm gains ideas from various kind of source and the innovative performance of the firm depends on how successful it makes use of the knowledge from these different sources. (Von Hippel, 1988; Cohen and Levinthal, 1990).
The prevalent open innovation strategy implicates firms to emphasis the word “cooperation”. Firms try to cooperate with their supplier, customers, private or public institutes, or even competitors to explore innovative knowledge. In most industries, firm-university cooperation is advocated by government and it is developing in a quick pace. Universities have abundant resource for basic research and applied research, but rarely does the research of universities directly turn out to product or service to serve the market (Pavirt,2001), because most universities lack commercialization skills. However, firms are familiar with the market and skillful in commercialization but suffer from weak research capabilities, so the cooperation between firms and universities could bring bilateral benefits.
According to the report of Wang (1997), there are mainly 3 ways (excluding outsourcing) that firms cooperate with universities for scientific research. The first one is that firms give financial support to the research subject conducting by universities. The most common way is that firms pay salaries for some researcher positions in the university. Researchers in these positions have to conduct research project in the interest of the company. This way of cooperation is quite common in USA, especially in disciplines like pharmacy, psychology and chemistry. The second cooperation way is firm-university joint research, both firm and university sends their professors to the laboratory to study on a particular research subject, the research fund is also supported by both parties. This way of cooperation is most effective because the risk and outcome are shared by both parties by which none of them will draw an inefficient attitude. The last way is that university professors come to corporate lab and join in the lab’s subject. In this way, corporate lab could conveniently bring external knowledge into their organization while university professors could gain knowledge from the lab’s existing research data. Besides, university professors who temporally work in corporate labs are usually paid both from the university and the firm, an increased income could raise their research motivation.
Due to the increasing industrial competition, firms now concern short-run return more than long-run benefit. Scientific research sometimes is treated as a luxury activity with high risk and long payoff time that could only be afford by monopoly and oligopoly companies (Schmidt, 2007). Nowadays, more and more firms start to outsource scientific research from external suppliers. In 2005, Conexant System outsources half of its scientific research to the scientific research center of Hyderabad City, India. In 2007, Nokia claimed the company will outsource all its research on cell phone chips and internal research resource will be mainly allocated to software development and other aspects. On the contrary, some famous corporate labs begin to provide research outsource service to other companies. For example, Xerox PARC became an independent subsidiary to provide research services and intellectual property to outside client (Schmidt, 2007). According to a statistic of Antisoma PLC, about 33% companies in the world outsource part or all of their scientific research subject to other companies or institutes in 2008 and the figure will still increase in the future. These facts indicate that research outsourcing is becoming a new form for firms to link with scientific research (Wu and Wang, 2008).
There are several motivations for a firm to outsource its scientific research to other firms or institutes. First of all, corporate labs require huge initial investment to startup; firms could relief its cost pressure from lab equipment and researcher salary by outsourcing. Then, firms could reduce research risk. Because scientific research is a kind of exploration which means no fruit is possible, outsourcing should be more flexible and share the risk with the outsource service provider. Third, outsourcing scientific research could also shorten research circles because firms could gain a much higher innovation capability under a contracted research group. A shorter product research & develop circle is very important in market competition, especially in IT industry. Besides, firms could escape from non-core competence business process by outsourcing and focus on improving their core competence.
Firm could gain ideas and innovative capability from various and different sources, but its performance depends on to what extend do the firm link with this sources appropriately. (Von Hippel, 1988l Cohen and Levinthal, 1990) So, It is crucial for firms to link with scientific research in an appropriate form. Management should consider precisely before making the decision. As we have analyzed the motivation and major linkage form in previous part of the report, we speculate that the following factors are vital for deciding which form to link with scientific research.
Legal institution should be considered first in deciding the optimal solution. The legal protection to intellectual property and the enforcement of contract law are crucial for sourcing innovative activity from external environment. Basically, if legal institution is void in the market, firms should mainly conduct scientific research in their corporate labs, which would enable firms to protect their intellectual property by keeping business secrets.
As argued before, the growth of a firm is determined by what resource the firm has and how adequate and effective does the firm uses them (Penrose, 1959). The availability of external adequate innovative source is a kind of resource that firms should pay attention to. The manager should identify whether there are adequate universities, firms or institutions with the firm’s reach that perform better in the firm’s research field. If no adequate external entity is within the firm reach, the firm can only rely on its own laboratory. Otherwise, the management should consider to source scientific research from those external entities in order to make the best use of firm’s resources.
According to Eisenhardt and Martin’s (2000) argument we discussed before, scientific research is a capability that helps companies sustaining their competitive advantages. So, the decision maker should consider the firm’s holding core competence at the moment and the firm’s pursuing core competence in the future. (Core competence is the most superior capability that creates completive advantage) If R&D capability is not the firm’s core competence, management should consider external source of innovative activities. On the contrary, the management should have deeper consideration about the industry the firm plays in if R&D is the firm’s core competence.
If R&D is the core competence of the firm, the decision maker should consider the product life cycle and the industry cycle, which is indicated by investment perspective. Normally, if the cycles are long, the firm should invest on its own laboratory because it brings highest return in the long run. On the contrary, firm should cooperate with universities on scientific research if the cycles are short, because a higher flexibility is very important in a quickly change environment.
Basic research involvement is the final factor that should take into consideration when R&D is not the core competence in this decision model. As mentioned before, universities have abundant basic research resource, so it will be wise to link with universities if the firm’s research project highly involves basic research activities. Nevertheless, firms should easily outsource their research projects to external firms or institutions if basic research is not so involved, which could provide the firm with highest flexibility and lowest risks.
Firms link with scientific research for several reasons, but basically these reasons are aimed at sustaining the firm’s long-term growth. Generally, there are mainly three forms for firms to link with scientific research: corporate lab, cooperation with universities and outsource to external firms and institutes. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, the critical argument is that mangers should sufficiently consider about firm’s particular situation and select an appropriate form to link with. Legal institution, external source availability, core competence, product life cycle in industry and basic research involvement are crucial factors that cannot be ignored in order to make the correct decision. The decision model build in this report will be helpful.
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