Management of collaboration in EUREKA projects: Experiences of UK participants

This paper describes findings on the management of collaboration arising from an evaluation of the participation of the UK in the EUREKA programme. The principal issues addressed in the paper are the origins and motivations for collaboration, the roles played by participants of different types and the significance of collaboration for project outcomes. The paper concludes that complementarity between partners is the key motivation for collaboration. Complementarity may lie in different dimensions, matching different types of technical expertise or technical and market expertise. Vertical relationships, between users and suppliers, emerged as being particularly important in EUREKA projects and frequently formed the initial basis for the collaborative application. The most important overall finding was that partnerships were genuinely interdependent, in part because of their foundation in complementarity. Successful collaborative structures were those which were sufficiently robust to accommodate the inevitable changes which arise in the turbulence of market conditions. This paper finishes with some conclusions concerning the appropriate role for government agencies in supporting participants in the management of collaboration.