Organizational diversity and innovation potential of EU-funded research projects

Impact evaluations of collaborative research projects usually focus on private benefits of participants, e.g. their turnover or employment growth. We study the innovative performance of collaborative research projects and how it depends on the organizational diversity of participating organizations. Our population includes participants to EC-funded collaborative research projects that are considered as key organisations behind delivering innovations. The focus on innovative rather than, for example, financial outcomes allows us to assess the transformative effect of publically-funded collaborative research. We show that the innovative potential of research output of homogenous partnerships, e.g. between two SMEs or two large companies, is likely to be higher, as compared to heterogeneous partnerships, e.g. an SME and a large company. The impact of universities on the potential of innovations is unclear. The total number of key organizations in delivering an innovation has negative impact on its potential. Neither project funding nor duration affects the potential of innovation. Our results implicitly show that, depending on the type of organization and consortium design, there are different incentives to contribute to innovative efforts and opportunities to appropriate their benefits.