دانلود رایگان مقاله برنامه مرکز تحقیقات تعاونی استرالیا: دیدگاه تئوری هزینه معامله

abstract

Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) in Australia are underpinned by funding from the Australian Government. Among their many goals, they are intended to lead to long-term sustainable relationships between industry and academic institutions without the need for further public funding. Yet concerns have been raised in various reports and reviews about the ability of CRCs to achieve sustainable collaboration beyond their initial seven-year life, despite the general observation that CRCs have proved beneficial to the broader Australian community and the economy in general. This study adduces Transaction Cost Theory to determine the impediments to long-term sustainable collaboration between industry and academia. It does so by examining relationships between CRC members at a member organisational level, rather than at an individual researcher or program level, as previous studies have done. The article concludes by introducing testable governance attributes that have the potential to minimise transaction costs between participants in industry-academic collaboration and therefore foster long-term research collaborations.

8. Concluding

remarks To extrapolate from the literature on TCT, government funding seems to play an important role in minimising the governance costs that would otherwise have to be borne by industry and academia in the context of a highly formalised and hierarchical applied research centre, such as a CRC. As a result, the initial hope that an initial injection of government funding would normally translate into a longer-term, financially sustainable relationship between CRC members, as per O’Kane (2008), emerges as inherently questionable. Government funding, which enables a coordinating umbrella-like governance structure to sit over an oftentimes extensive collection of collaborative projects, therefore allows the existence of a mechanism such as a dedicated and nonaligned central CRC management team to address costs associated with monitoring and enforcement, which the theoretical literature associates with hierarchical structures.