What do we know about Firms’ Research Collaborationwith Universities? : New Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence

Abstract

This chapter provides an integrated view of knowledge transfer between university and industryby combining two different approaches. First, we report results from an econometric analysis,where recent matching techniques are used on a dataset of 2,071 Swedish firms. Our findingsfrom this analysis strongly suggest that university collaboration has a positive influence on theinnovative activity of large manufacturing firms. In contrast, there appears to be an insignificantassociation between university collaboration and the average service firm’s innovation output.Second, in the pursuit of credible explanations for these findings, we apply a semi-structuredinterview methodology on 39 randomly selected firms collaborating with two researchuniversities in Stockholm, Sweden. We identify three ideas for how collaboration may help firmsbecome more innovative in the literature of innovation studies. In analysis of the interviews, wefind very weak support for the first idea; that firms are able to exploit and market innovationsoriginating in the university. The second idea – that firms improve their internal innovativecapability by collaboration – is found to apply to about half of the investigated firms. Innovationefficiency gains in the form of reduced cost and risk for innovation projects, which is a third ideasuggested by the literature, are also suggested to be a major factor behind firms’ benefits. Finally,we offer tentative explanations for the lack of measurable effects of collaboration for servicefirms.QC 2012020