Quantity or Quality? Collaboration Strategies in Research and Development and Incentives to Patent

Using count data models controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, this study shows for a large sample of R&D-active manufacturing firms in Flanders that collaborative R&D has a positive effect on firms’ patenting in terms of both quantity and quality. However, when distinguishing between alliances that aim at joint creation of new knowledge and alliances that aim at the exchange of existing knowledge, the results suggest that the positive effect on patenting quantity is to a large extent driven by knowledge exchange alliances rather than joint R&D. Firms engaged in creation alliances, on the other hand, receive more forward citations per patent which indicates that joint R&D enhances patent quality. In the light of the literature on strategic patenting, our results may further suggest that creation alliances lead to patents that are filed to protect valuable intellectual property, while exchange alliances drive “portfolio patenting” which has been shown to result in fewer citations for the individual patent.