Inter-organizational collaboration in academia: is it worth one’s while?

Research organizations are increasingly a context where the barriers related to physical distance are blurring. Indeed social, political and organizational pressures to inter-organizational collaboration are intensifying. This paper adopts a longitudinal approach to study the phenomenon of collaboration, investigating specifically the relationship between the mix of internal and external collaboration ties and the researcher’s performance. Analyzing the collaboration ties of researchers employed in a major Italian University from 2000 to 2007 through panel analysis, we found support for the hypothesis that more inter-organizational collaboration leads to superior performance. This result helps to deepen the understanding of the evolution of collaboration in research organizations and has implications for both management and policy.