臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.29 NO.1

105 NTU Management Review Vol. 29 No. 1 Apr. 2019 an organization’s objectives”. Freeman (1984) claims that any organization may be unable to exist without supports from those individuals or groups. There are various typologies of stakeholders in the extant literature. For instance, Savage, Nix, Whitehead, and Blair (1991) delineate four types of stakeholders, i.e., supportive, marginal, non-supportive and mixed blessing, with a two-by-two matrix consisted of the stakeholder’s potential threat to organization and the stakeholder’s potential for cooperation. Freeman (1984) suggests two broad types defined by the directness and strength of connections with the firm: the internal stakeholders (e.g., financiers, customers, suppliers, employees, and communities) and the external stakeholders (e.g., governments, NGOs, critics, the media, and others). Vandekerckhove and Dentchev (2005) propose three types of stakeholders according to their contribution levels to a firm: the primary stakeholders who contribute significantly to the firm’s survival, the secondary stakeholders who make a more limited contribution, and the non-stakeholders who are neither influenced by the focal firm nor crucial for the firm’s survival. Fassin (2009) presents four types based on the interest concerns with a firm: the stakeholder who has a concrete stake in the focal firm with a real positive or at least the expected loyal interest, the stakewatcher (e.g., pressure groups, unions), the stakekeeper (e.g., independent regulators), and the non-stakeholder. For fitting our synthesis framework, we apply Freeman’s (1984) typology to delineate the groups of R&D collaborative candidates. We group the customers, suppliers and complements of the focal firm as the internal stakeholders, and the professionals, research institutes, and universities as the external stakeholders. The grouping foundation is rooted in the degree of relational closeness that assumes trust to exist in much closer ties (Freeman, 1984). Our typology is in line with that of Savage et al. (1991). Savage et al. (1991) attribute suppliers as the supportive stakeholders, and attribute customers, the professionals, technological research institutions and universities as the mixed blessing stakeholder; they suggest the involving strategy for the former and the collaborative strategy for the latter. As such, the focal firm will be more inclined to partner these two kinds of stakeholders for the R&D collaboration. Our typology is also similar to that of Belderbos et al. (2004), who analyze the impact of R&D cooperation on the firm performance and identify four types of R&D partners as competitors, suppliers, customers, universities and research institutes. However, different from Belderbos et al. (2004), we consider competitors to be less likely to become potential partners due to the expropriation problem caused by information asymmetry and opportunism. As Miotti and Sachwald (2003) claim, the tension between the resource considerations which constitutes an