What are the changes in monetary value of contracts

In summary, the number of contractual relationships increases over the nine year period both in terms of number of ULP laboratories involved and contracts signed this produces a decrease in concentration of chemistry contracts by laboratory. A double polarisation phenomenon occurs for contract length and budget (medium contract length and budget decrease in favour of the extreme classes). The share of services increases and research activities seem to remain stable. 

Note that in class A, most of the contracts are contracts with value zero , because they correspond essentially to service contracts, implementing an agreement on the unit costs of the service (for example, a particular analysis), the number of units executed being defined in real time during the year depending on the needs of the client. 

An alternative explanatory hypothesis is that the changes in the average characteristics of contracts might be due to a structural change in the demand for collaboration by F I with universities. In Section 4 we showed that all types of laboratories, those new to the game and those with experience and more persistent collaborations, shifted over time towards smaller sized, shorter duration and more service-oriented types of contracts. This is a sign of structural change in the relationship between universities and firms. 

To examine these two alternatives we deploy an industrial economics approach to the analysis of entry and exit in the market or game of university-industry collaboration, focusing first on the F I and then on the ULP laboratories. As in the previous analysis, we consider the three sub-periods 1990-1992 1993-1995 1996-1998. The analysis aims at exploring whether some laboratories have more continuous collaboration with F I, that is, whether they collaborate in a persistent way with F I. On the basis of the results of this analysis we will be able to provide some evidence in support of the two alternative interpretations of the changes in the characteristics of the contracts proposed above. If the first hypothesis is true, the characteristics of the contracts signed by those laboratories and F I that have had a persistent 

We start by briefly analysing persistent F I we then move on to the detailed examination of persistent laboratories followed by examination of the interaction between persistent firms and persistent laboratories. We conclude this section with a first attempt to test the validity of the two alternative interpretations suggested above. 

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