Abstract
This paper investigates the contribution of the personal ties of former graduate students to university-firm collaboration. Using the proximity framework and the underlying assumptions of social proximity, we argue that the academic relations these students developed through graduate education can reduce the social distance between universities and firms, thus favoring collaborative research and technology transfer. Based on this argument, two hypotheses are presented to explain how the hiring of a former graduate student is associated with firms’ collaboration decisions, constituting a driver of technology transfer. We empirically test these hypotheses with a new empirical strategy and use a novel and comprehensive dataset on university-industry linkages in Brazil. We find that approximately 40% of the collaborations were developed by firms with ‘socially proximate’ research groups, i.e., those hosted by universities where one or more firm employees attended graduate education. The estimates suggest that if a research group is socially proximate to a firm, the latter is more likely to choose this research group to partner with (relative odds approximately 2.5 times higher) and to engage in collaboration with (odds ratio more than 8 times higher). These results suggest new approaches for policy support to these partnerships, using academic relations as a lever to new collaborative projects.
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Notes
Herein interpreted as referring exclusively to master’s and PhD programs, which constitute ‘stricto sensu’ graduate education in Brazil, that is, the only programs that grant an academic degree, not including any other programs that award a nonacademic certificate (such as professional training).
Access to confidential data was granted by the Brazilian Institute of Educational Research (Inep) for purposes of this research.
We use the ‘main field of education’ of each research group (CNPQ, 2016) as the narrow knowledge area.
For firms that collaborated, the narrow knowledge area of interest is the one of the actual partner research groups, while for firms that did not collaborate, we use the most frequent narrow knowledge area of partners of firms of the same sector (using the International Standard Industrial Classification – ISIC, 2-digit level).
The similarities between the actual and estimated most-likely partners are discussed with the results of the empirical analysis.
Therefore, e.g., the odds that a research group is chosen by a collaborative firm at the first stage is 1.7% higher than the odds of a younger group for each year of difference in age between them (column 1 of Table 3). On the other hand, commercial firms are 54.8% (1 – 0.452) less likely (i.e., lower relative odds) to engage in collaboration at the second stage than noncommercial firms (column 1 of Table 4).
The social proximity variable presents the same value in 80% of the cases; the values for institutional proximity matches 71% of the times; and the average difference of geographical distance is only 0.72 (14% of the standard deviation presented in Table 1).
‘Rare events’ estimators may create additional problems by overcorrecting (Leitgöb, 2013) or introducing other biases in the estimates (Elgmati et al., 2015; Puhr et al., 2017). For such reasons, we followed the previous studies (Long, 2004; Skinner, 2019) that have used the standard logistic regression to estimate the second stage.
‘Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics’ and ‘Information and Communication Technologies’.
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Colombo, D.G.e., Garcia, R.C. The role of the academic relations of former graduate students in university-firm collaboration. J Technol Transf 47, 1524–1548 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-021-09881-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-021-09881-2