Industrial Organization Commons^™

The Emergence Of A Small World In A Network Of Research Joint Ventures, Stuart Mcdonald

Stuart McDonald

Using a data set spanning the period 1899-2000, we construct a network of RJVs and track the pattern of growth of this network over time. The resulting R&D network is emergent in the sense that RJVs are contained within it, connected to other RJVs by the existence of firms sharing membership with multiple RJVs. This paper shows that the largest growth in the R&D networks occurred during the last three decades of the Twentieth Century. During this growth period, the R&D network has a pattern of collaboration that can be characterised as having the “small world” property. This has implications …