Intellectual Property in Inter-firm R&D Collaboration, An Examination on the Role of IP Management Core Components

Inter-firm R&D collaboration is valuable for companies when it helps them to gain complementary intellectual resources, access to diverse markets, share product development's cost, shorten the time to market of new products, and avoiding redundant expenditures. This kind of collaboration could be considered as a good way responding to the modern business world today which is dynamic, complex, and intensively competitive. This research therefore focus on the role of Intellectual property shared and used in Design service where inter-firm R&D collaboration is major activity, the supporting functions of IP management's core components developed in previous research. Conducting a survey from new product development managers of Taiwan's high-tech industry, this research's result shows that Know how-related intellectual property has positive effects on indicating factors of design service performance such as Time to market, productivity, quality, and efficiency. Another result indicates that four of IP management's core components are positive associated with the performance of design service, those core components are: Legalization capability, intra-firm relationship capability, collaboration formation capability, and main goal of collaboration.