Empirical analysis of university-industry R&D collaboration: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

University-industry collaboration plays a vital role in nation's innovation system. This study presents an empirical analysis of R&D collaboration between university and industry. The literature focused on the all those factors including firm size, firm's innovation activity and openness of the firm affecting university-industry collaboration. Primary data is used and sample contains 15 industrial sectors of Pakistan according to market capitalization at the time of data collection. The empirical results of the study suggest that firm's size, number of employees and openness of the firm have positive impact on uni-industry collaboration for R&D projects. Whilst annual budget of the firms is found to have negative relationship with R&D collaborations and larger firms are found to be less efficient in taking advantages of R&D collaboration with universities because larger firms have more spending on their fixed costs as they have participated in so many R&D activities.