  Governments have long standing interests in preventing market failures and
enhancing innovation in strategic industries. Public policy regarding domestic
technology is critical to both national security and economic prosperity.
Governments often seek to enhance their global competitiveness by promoting
private sector cooperative activity at the inter-organizational level. Research
on network governance has illuminated the structure of boundary-spanning
collaboration mainly for programs with immediate public or non-profit
objectives. Far less research has examined how governments might accelerate
private sector cooperation to prevent market failures or to enhance innovation.
The theoretical contribution of this research is to suggest that government
programs might catalyze cooperative activity by accelerating the preferential
attachment mechanism inherent in social networks. We analyze the long-term
effects of a government program on the strategic alliance network of 451
organizations in the high-tech semiconductor industry between 1987 and 1999,
using stochastic network analysis methods for longitudinal social networks.
