7: Was the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 Successful?

Reflecting on the year after year number of new RJVs formed and disclosed in the Federal Register, I suggested, based on Fig. 4.1, that the NCRA was successful for about a decade and then its success in promoting collaborative R&D dwindled. To be balanced, I then offer other interpretations of the data to refute my own conjecture. The NRJVD contains some information, albeit limited and certainly not conclusive, that the NCRA has had some social benefits. In this chapter, I build on the arguments that I put forth in Chapter 4.

As background, I along with John Scott (Link & Scott, 2011) have developed methodological criteria for the evaluation of public support of research activity. Our methodology focused on financial support of R&D. We posited two evaluation approaches, a counterfactual evaluation method and the spillover evaluation method.