FirmCORe: A Benchmark for Structured Reasoning about Inter-Firm Collaboration Opportunities

Comprehensive structured data on inter-firm relationships is often scarce or inaccessible because many relationships are privately negotiated, selectively disclosed, and fragmented across proprietary databases. This scarcity hinders the discovery of collaboration opportunities, particularly for startups and small and medium-sized enterprises. Firm profiles are readily available, but collaboration potential cannot be inferred from business similarity alone, since similar firms may be competitors, whereas dissimilar firms may offer complementary products, technologies, channels, capabilities, or capital. We present FirmCORe (Inter-Firm Collaboration Opportunity Reasoning), a human-annotated benchmark for pairwise reasoning over weakly structured firm profiles, comprising 2,805 labeled firm pairs. Given two firm profiles, a model must determine whether the available evidence supports a collaboration opportunity and, for positive pairs, jointly predict its strength, primary collaboration type, and role direction. FirmCORe also provides parallel Chinese- and English-language evaluation sets containing identical instances and gold labels, enabling controlled analysis of input-language sensitivity. Experiments with representative locally deployed and hosted large language models (LLMs) show that the strongest model achieves a macro-F1 score of 74.51 for opportunity detection but only 61.57% exact match across all four output fields. Language effects vary across models, and high cross-language agreement can mask errors shared across languages. These results indicate that current LLMs are substantially more reliable at detecting broad collaboration opportunities than at identifying their specific types and role directions.