Knowledge Procurement Strategy of Firms: Collaboration with Public R&D Institutes

The majority of new services are provided to the consumer through several coordinated and contributing agents acting together. This paper is concerned with improving our understanding of firms\´ knowledge procurement that involves several contributing and coordinated agents. The "distributedness" of knowledge procurement varies in physical proximity and takes a variety of organizational arrangement, and their analysis brings to the fore the significance of firms\´ strategy tailored to the collaboration with a specific economic agent. Based on our empirical research, the analysis opens up considerations on how firms can effectively procure knowledge from public R&D institutes. In contrast to the case of collaboration with universities, the paper concludes that firms can benefit from collaborating with capable public R&D institutes irrespective of the physical proximities between firms and their partnering institutes