RESEARCH JOINT VENTURES Yannis Caloghirou National Technical University of Athens Stavros Ioannides Panteion University, Athens Nicholas S. Vonortas The George Washington University Abstract. Inter-firm collaboration is not new. What is new is that such collabor- ation has exploded during the past couple of decades, in parallel to the intensifica- tion of international competition. Moreover, the nature of collaboration has changed, shifting from peripheral interests to the very core functions of the corporation, and from equity to non-equity forms of collaboration. Importantly, cooperation focusing on the generation, exchange, and/or adaptation of new technologies has risen at very fast rates. Research joint ventures, the focus of this paper, belong in the latter category. The proliferation of RJVs has created extensive interest among economists, business analysts, and policy decision-makers and led to the profusion of litera- ture on the topic. This paper critically reviews the literature in industrial econom- ics and strategic management that deals with RJV partner motives and RJV outcomes. The paper categorizes the different streams of this literature and indicates the state-of-the-art, synthesizes important understandings, and suggests key nodes of a future research agenda. Keywords. Joint ventures; Co-operation; Alliances; Research and development 1. Introduction More than a decade ago, an OECD publication gave what could be considered a classic definition of joint ventures (JVs). JVs were defined as activities ‘‘. . . in which the operations of two or more firms are partially, but not totally, function- ally integrated in order to carry out activities in one or more of the following areas: (i) buying or selling operations; (ii) natural resource exploration, develop- ment and/or production operations; (iii) research and development operations; and, (iv) engineering and construction operations.’’ (OECD, 1986). The proliferation of a wide variety of inter-firm cooperative agreements since the early 1980s, however, required new definitions of cooperation (Hagedoorn 0950-0804/03/04 0541–30 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS Vol. 17, No. 4 # Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA.