Innovation and university collaboration: paradox and complexity within the knowledge economy

Howells, Jeremy; Ramlogan, Ronnie; Cheng, Shu Li

doi:10.1093/cje/bes013

Cited by 113 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Furthermore, the cognitive distance between firms and URIs may weaken the value of academic collaborations. For instance, firms often cannot objectively rate universities as a source of information because of the differences in evaluations concerning the optimal quality of an invention (Howells et al, 2012). This cognitive distance can be particularly large when managers are trained to think "internally" (Grönlund et al, 2010) and have not developed an open culture.…”

Section: The Benefits and Costs Of Academic Collaborationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Chinese innovation model differs from developed country models not only in its reliance on URIs but also in the context in which it originates. Because universityindustry theory is not universally valid (Howells et al, 2012), one challenge here is to identify how the Chinese innovation context differs from what theory about Western countries assumes and predicts, and understand how such differences influence the effectiveness of academic collaborations in enhancing EMEs' innovation performance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Academic collaborations and firm innovation performance in China: The role of region-specific institutions

et al. 2015

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Although prior research has highlighted the importance of academic collaborations in enhancing firms' innovation performance, it has largely focused on developed countries. As a result, it remains unclear how academic collaborations influence innovation in emerging countries, which differ fundamentally in their institutional environment. We contribute to this literature by examining how collaborations with universities and research institutes influence the ability of Chinese emerging market enterprises (EMEs) to develop innovations. Our analysis challenges the assumption of institutional homogeneity within a given country, showing that institutions evolve in different ways across sub-national Chinese regions. This uneven institutional evolution affects the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR), the level of international openness, the quality of universities and research institutes across regions and, consequently, how much Chinese EMEs benefit from academic collaborations.Our findings reveal that sub-national institutional variations have a profound impact on the relationship between academic collaborations and firms' innovation performance, show that some established assumptions are not valid in emerging countries such as China, and offer insights into how EMEs enhance their innovation performance.

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Section: The Benefits and Costs Of Academic Collaborationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic collaborations and firm innovation performance in China: The role of region-specific institutions

et al. 2015

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“…Firms in general tend to rank PROs relatively low as sources of innovation. However, firms that collaborate with PROs are much more innovative than firms without links to PROs (Howells et al, 2012). To realize the potential of PRO collaboration, greater knowledge is necessary concerning how firms can develop and sustain a fruitful collaboration in which the collaborative partners are able to learn from one another and develop innovations (Spithoven et al, 2011, Zahra and George, 2002, Inkpen and Tsang, 2005.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaboration for Innovation: A Case Study on How Social Capital Mitigates Collaborative Challenges in University–Industry Research Alliances

Steinmo

2015

Industry and Innovation

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Universities and public research organizations (PROs) are valuable sources of knowledge on innovation development for firms. Differences in goals and approaches between firms and PROs often create tension and lead to challenges that prevent achieving fruitful collaboration. This paper explores how the development of cognitive and relational social capital can mitigate such challenges and encourage fruitful collaboration between firms and PROs in research alliances over time and further lead to the development of innovations. By comparing three firms participating in a well-established research alliance with three firms participating in an emerging one, the development of both cognitive and relational social capital at the individual, organizational and alliance level is shown to be crucial for effective collaboration in research alliances over time. Common goals and understandings regarding the collaboration and the creation of personal relationships between the employees of firms and PROs contribute to mitigating collaborative challenges, to cohesion and to the achievement of goals to create innovation. Moreover, the presence of at least one of the dimensions of social capital appears to be necessary when entering a research alliance for the first time because cognitive and relational social capital are found to be mutually reinforced over time.

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“…Universities, as publicly funded institutions, conducting and disseminating research, are highly valued contributors to the knowledge development for economic growth and development (Feller, 1990;Howells, Ramlogan, & Cheng, 2012). The dissemination of their research outcomes is next to teaching seen as a major part of the impacts universities provide for their environment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing Knowledge Transfer from University to Industry: A Text Mining Approach

Woltmann

Alkærsig

2017

Proceedings

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This paper identifies transferred knowledge between universities and the industry by proposing the use of a computational linguistic method. Current research on university-industry knowledge exchange relies often on formal databases and indicators such as patents, collaborative publications and license agreements, to assess the contribution to the socioeconomic surrounding of universities. We, on the other hand, use the texts from university abstracts to identify university knowledge and compare them with texts from firm webpages. We use these text data to identify common key words and thereby identify overlapping contents among the texts. As method we use a well-established word ranking method from the field of information retrieval term frequency-inverse document frequency (TFIDF) to identify commonalities between texts from university. In examining the outcomes of the TFIDF statistic we find that several websites contain very related and partly even traceable content from the university. The results show that university research is represented in the websites of industrial partners. We propose further improvements to enhance the results and potential areas for future implementation. This paper is the first step to enable the identification of common knowledge and knowledge transfer via text mining to increase its measurability.

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Innovation and university collaboration: paradox and complexity within the knowledge economy

Cited by 113 publications

References 37 publications

Academic collaborations and firm innovation performance in China: The role of region-specific institutions

Academic collaborations and firm innovation performance in China: The role of region-specific institutions

Collaboration for Innovation: A Case Study on How Social Capital Mitigates Collaborative Challenges in University–Industry Research Alliances

Tracing Knowledge Transfer from University to Industry: A Text Mining Approach

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