Applied and collaborative? Essays on the changing nature of corporate scientific research

Corporate science, intended as scientific research conducted by business companies, is a key input to innovation worldwide. Some recent evidence has documented its quantitative decline since its heyday in the late 1960s, as measured by the shrinking share of scientific publications by business-affiliated authors, mostly due to the downsizing or closure of large corporate laboratories. This thesis complements this evidence, showing that firms are not disengaging from scientific research but are changing their organisation by moving from vertically integrated R&D activities towards a more dynamic system of applied in-house research and collaborations with universities.