Abstract
This paper advances our understanding of university-industry research and development (R&D) collaborations. These strategic relationships are a dimension of entrepreneurial activity, and they are thus important drivers of economic growth and development. Business collaboration with universities increases the efficiency and effectiveness of industrial investments. Previous studies have found that universities are more likely to collaborate with industry if the business is mature and large, is engaged in exploratory internal R&D, and there are not major intellectual property (IP) issues between both parties. Businesses gain from such collaborations through increased commercialisation probabilities and economies of technological scope. Based on publicly available data collected by the Science-to-Business Marketing Research Centre of Germany as part of a European Commission project, our paper focuses on two key questions. First, why are there cross-country differences in the extent to which universities collaborate with business in R&D? Second, are there covariates with these differences that might offer insight into policy prescriptions and policy levers for enhancing the extent to which such collaboration takes place? We find that access is positive and statistically significant in relation to fostering university-business R&D collaborations. Our results, albeit that they are tempered by a small sample of data, have implications how national innovation systems support further harmonization of IP regimes across universities and how universities prioritize their own investments and incentives.
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Notes
HEIs refer to all types of formally recognized institutions that provide higher education. Among those recognized by relevant national/regional authorities are: universities, universities of applied sciences, polytechnics /technical universities, and colleges and tertiary schools (Davey et al. 2011, p. 7).
Over 3,000 HEIs participated in the study; it resulted in a sampling population of 6,280 academics and HEI representatives (Davey et al. 2011, p. 7).
Each country study is titled “The State of University-Business Cooperation in [the country], and each report is available at http://www.ub-cooperation.eu/index/[the country].
Other dimensions of collaboration summarized in the report included mobility of academics, mobility of students, commercialization of R&D results, curriculum development and delivery, lifelong learning, entrepreneurship, and governance. It is important to emphasize that responses to this question is from the perspective of the HEI.
We see this fact being in concert with the premise that motivated the S2BMRC study for the European Commission, as quoted above.
See Cunningham et al. (2014) for a parallel discussion of knowledge transfer from universities and public institutions.
Other country-specific examples are in OECD (2013).
Bonaccorsi et al. (forthcoming) suggest that the knowledge conditions external to the university may influence university-industry collaborations. Their scholarship not only motivates the inclusion of this variable but also complements our recommendations in Section V below.
A Tobit specification is appropriate because the variable RDCollab has a Likert scale upper bound of 10.
This recommendation may be overly optimistic. As Hülsbeck et al. (2013) have discussed from the perspective of Germany, most technology transfer offices at public universities are occupied with individuals with little experience of specific human capital in the natural sciences.
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Cunningham, J.A., Link, A.N. Fostering university-industry R&D collaborations in European Union countries. Int Entrep Manag J 11, 849–860 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-014-0317-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-014-0317-4