Inter-firm R&D collaboration is valuablefor companies when it helps them to gaincomplementary intellectual resources, access to diversemarkets, share product development’scost, shorten thetime to market of new products, and avoid redundantexpenditures. This kind of collaboration could beconsidered as a good way responding to the modernbusiness world today which is dynamic, complex, andintensively competitive. This research therefore focus onthe role of Intellectual Property shared and used inDesign service where inter-firm R&D collaboration ismajor activity, the supporting functions of IPmanagement’s core components developed in previousresearch. The questionnaire was sent to 494 participants,all of them are heads of marketing department, R&Ddepartment, manufacturing department and engineeringdepartment. There are 41 valid samples (response rateof 8.3%) that be analyzed by the SPSS analysis andcomplete questionnaires by the quantitative analysis.Conducting a survey from new product developmentmanagers of Taiwan’s high-tech industry, this resultshows that knowhow-related Intellectual Property haspositive effects on indicating factors of design serviceperformance such as time to market, productivity,quality, and efficiency. Another result indicates that fourof IP management’s core components are positiveassociated with the performance of design service. Thosecore components are: Legalization capability, intra-firmrelationship capability, collaboration formationcapability, and main goal of collaboration.