Sticky partnerships or fresh starts? How failed project applications shape organisations’ collaborative behaviour in R&D networks

Prior inter-organisational collaboration is a well-established antecedent of tie formation in competitive publicly funded R&D networks. But what happens when organisations come together to develop a project proposal and apply for funding, but their application is unsuccessful? This paper investigates how the joint experience of failure influences future tie formation, and how this effect varies for organisations with different levels of cognitive proximity. The analysis builds on a policy-induced collaborative network of approved and rejected R&D project proposals in Valencia region (Spain), in 2016 – 2022. The findings suggest that unsuccessful funding applications have a positive and stronger influence on partners’ future tie formation than successful ones. Moreover, the propensity of actors to re-engage following a rejection is greater if they are cognitively distant. The paper demonstrates that empirical work on R&D network dynamics may be systematically underrating partners’ prior funding application failures as a fundamental antecedent of tie formation.