To promote collaboration between firms and non-corporate entities, Congress needs to broaden the R&D credit for collaborative energy-related research to any area of collaborative research and expand the rate from 20 to 40 percent.

There are several reasons to treat collaborative research more generously. First, participation in research consortia has a positive impact on firms’ own R&D expenditures and research productivity. Second, most collaborative research is more basic and exploratory than research typically conducted by a single company. Moreover, the research results are often shared, often through