Benchmarking interorganisational technology cooperation: the link between infrastructure and sustained performance

Cooperative efforts among government, industry, and universities have gown in importance as strong contributors to the nation's technological and economic competitiveness in the global environment. Such efforts include cooperation among networks of government R&D/technology laboratories, industrial R&D laboratories, and universities. The resulting novel organisational formats created to accommodate these cooperative efforts influence the degree to which such multipartner cooperations perform in a sustained manner. A stellar example of the complex, multipartner cooperative programs is the network of 52 industry-university-cooperative research centres (IUCRCs) established in 1973 and supported by the National Science Foundation.