How does the Commercial Potential of Research Shape International Collaboration

• In Event: Innovation Policy, R&D Systems, and Science Funding

Abstract

While government support for fundamental research is often premised on its untapped potential for broad public benefit (Nelson, 1959), studies have also noted a growing normative and institutional tension between commercialization and open science (Heller & Eisenberg, 1998). Moreover, increasing geopolitical tensions (Yang et al., 2025) and the shrinking distance between basic research and commercial frontiers (Ahmadpoor & Jones, 2017) have led many governments to reassess unconstrained international collaboration. In this paper, we draw on the case of Korean researchers from government-funded research institutions (GRIs), operating under an explicit national R&D internationalization policy, to ask whether decisions to pursue international collaboration are shaped by the commercial potential of the research project. Our focus on commercial potential extends existing literature on international collaboration, which has largely examined such decisions through the lens of resource acquisition and scientific advancement (Luukkonen et al., 1992). In particular, our research question lies at the tension between the benefits of international collaboration (Katz & Martin, 1997), such as access to vital resources like knowledge flows and tacit information, and the costs of international collaboration, including increased transaction costs over IP ownership, regulatory compliance, and national security issues.To address our research questions, this paper empirically examines the relationship between a project’s commercial potential and the subsequent realization of international collaboration. We use project-level data from Korean government-funded research institutes (GRIs), and further investigate whether the association between commercial potential and international collaboration varies across organizations’ commercialization experience, their commercialization-oriented evaluation, institutional incentive system, and the research field. Our data covers 21,880 projects from 22 GRIs registered in NTIS (National Science & Technology Information Service) between 2007 and 2025, which provide a list of publications produced by each grant. We link project publications to OpenAlex to identify whether each project involved international collaboration, and use project patent outputs and institution-level evaluation policies to measure commercial potential, institutional commercialization experience, and commercialization incentives. The empirical main analysis uses a logistic regression model with international collaboration as the dependent variable, controlling for funding size, the number of participating researchers, research field, year, and institution fixed effects.Our main regression result suggests that the patent ratio is negatively associated with international collaboration, even after accounting for a full battery of control variables. This finding suggests that a commercial potential of a research project, which may encompass concerns over appropriability, intellectual property protection, and coordination costs, may constrain cross-border collaboration. We further find that this negative relationship holds at the organization level, such that GRIs with a higher average patent orientation and stronger commercialization incentives tended to exhibit lower overall levels of international collaboration. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence, based on project-level data from Korean government-funded research institutes, that higher commercial potential is associated with a lower likelihood of international collaboration. Meanwhile, we find that this relationship does not hold uniformly across all fields but varies with disciplinary research practices and context.

Author

• SeoHyeon Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  Presenting Author