  The dynamics of collaboration networks of firms follow a life-cycle of growth
and decline. That does not imply they also become less resilient. Instead,
declining collaboration networks may still have the ability to mitigate shocks
from firms leaving, and to recover from these losses by adapting to new
partners. To demonstrate this, we analyze 21.500 R\&D collaborations of 14.500
firms in six different industrial sectors over 25 years. We calculate
time-dependent probabilities of firms leaving the network and simulate drop-out
cascades, to determine the expected dynamics of decline. We then show that
deviations from these expectations result from the adaptivity of the network,
which mitigates the decline. These deviations can be used as a measure of
network resilience.
