Adaptation of Risk Sharing Partnerships (RSP) to New Industries

The aerospace industry has since the 1990s used a partnership model called Risk Sharing Partnerships (RSP) to handle certain challenges faced in the development of new aircrafts. The RSP model allows the client to include key suppliers in the development of a new product, and hence sharing the burden of investment, risk mitigation, as well as the future sales income. This makes it easier to acquire funding for the development of new products and technologies, in addition to accelerating the development process by including key competencies earlier (Buzacott and Peng in Eur J Oper Res 218:656–666, 2012). RSP have raised interest in other industries, which calls for increased knowledge of contingency factors of the RSP, as well as suppliers’ perspective on RSP as a partnership model. Both are regarded important if cross-industry learning is to be promoted. By using a literature review of existing studies on RSP, combined with a case study of two aerospace suppliers, this study investigates the contingency factors of the RSP as a foundation for cross-industry transfer of knowledge, and proposes a model to assist cross-industry adaptation in project-based industries. We propose that there are three critical contingency dimensions for RSP-implementation, based on both financial and relational factors.