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The development of formal ICT standards is a challenging form of collaborative innovation, combining consensus decision making and R&D rivalry. To supplement this formal standard setting process, it has thus become frequent that part of the involved firms creates ad hoc consortia to better align positions on a common technology roadmap. This paper aims to assess whether such consortia can effectively mitigate R&D coordination failure through enhanced cooperation. We first develop a theoretical model showing that depending on the nature of firms' incentives to contribute proprietary technology, different types of R&D coordination failure – namely a Public Good or Rent Seeking problem – may occur in equilibrium. Using a large panel of standards, we then confirm empirically the prediction that consortia have different effects on innovation under a Public Good or Rent Seeking regime. Overall, we observe an …