<p><strong>Purpose:</strong> The main aim of the paper is to investigate the determinants of university-industry links, considering the number of contracts with industry as an output variable. Also, the spatial dimension of contracts is examined, explaining to what extent U-I cooperation is anchored regionally or nationally.</p><p><strong>Methodology/Approach:</strong> The paper uses a unique dataset comprising 1,158 contracts with industry at the 25 faculties belonging to five technical universities in Slovakia. Negative binomial regression analysis is used to evaluate the determinants for academic engagement in contract research.</p><p><strong>Findings:</strong> Empirical findings reveal the impact of the factors such as age, personnel structure, the intensity of supervising and experience in research projects financed by public authorities, mattering more than patenting or teaching intensity in the propensity of researchers to engage with industry.</p><p><strong>Research Limitation/implication:</strong> The outcomes only concern technical universities in Slovakia, and there is still room for analysis of other faculties comprising other subject areas. Since there is no longer time series data, the 2014-2016 timeframe did not permit to explore additional contexts in the model.</p><strong>Originality/Value of paper:</strong> Foremost, this is the first attempt to investigate the relationship between different factors and the level of contract research in Slovakia, making several contributions to the existing literature.

The issue of human capital in the present-day industrially and technologically driven society is becoming an increasingly hot topic. For enterprises in Slovakia thus it presents a challenge to respond to the current trends such as gradual robotization that will lead to the replacement of less qualified jobs by technology in the nearest years. For these reasons also, countries, enterprises or individuals must invest more in the development of human capital but at the same time take into account the return on this investment from the enterprises' perspective. The purpose of this paper is to find out how and how much time enterprises in Slovakia devote to the issue of the relationship between the development of human resources and investment in human capital. We also aim to explore whether enterprises assess this investment in human capital at all and in which way they do it. In this paper, we used quantitative research, namely a questionnaire method, which showed that enterprises in Slovakia do not largely invest in the development of their employees. Most companies invest in the development of employees by providing work-related training courses or by offering lectures, workshops and seminars. The results suggest that enterprises most frequently calculate remuneration costs and annual staffing costs that can be considered as traditional methods which, however, represent employees as companies' human resources being their liability not an asset they need to develop and invest into.