Co-operative activities, or joint ventures, are becoming increasingly popular as instruments of strategic action. But although more and more companies are entering into these alliances full of hope and enthusiasm, past experience shows that most will be likely to experience the disillusionment of having their ventures fall apart. William Murphy contends that our understanding of the strategic management of collective action needs improvement if the hoped for benefits of co-operation are to be realized. In this work, he examines the management of a specific type of co-operative action that has become critically important to company and national competitiveness: the co-operative research venture. Murphy thoroughly details this new class of inter-firm co-operation to produce knowledge, which has only recently been made possible by changes in the competitive and legal environment. He begins with an introduction and review of the prior literature on co-operative ventures, followed by an extensive survey of competition and co-operation. The management challenges of co-operative research, particularly the need to forge a consensus among participants, are examined in a brief chapter, which precedes four studies of specific co-operative ventures: the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Sematech, and US Memories. A final chapter draws conclusions and lessons from the examples, and three appendixes detail anti-trust laws applicable to co-operative ventures, Japanese and European microelectronic and computer ventures, and co-operative ventures under NCRA.