University industry links and product innovation: cooperate or contract?

Abstract

Abstract:The role of universities in product innovation has received considerable attention over the past decade. However, little is known about how the type of formal university-firm interaction predicts innovative performance and the degree of novelty of new products. This research differentiates two forms of firm high-relational interaction with universities: R&D contracting and cooperation. We exploit the panel structure of a dataset of 5,858 Spanish manufacturing firms with fixed-effects models. The empirical analysis finds that, although both contracting and cooperation predict product innovative performance, the two activities differ in the degree of novelty of new product outcomes. The implications are that the codified nature and asymmetric scope of R&D contracting is more suitable for exploitative innovation, resulting in product innovation that is incremental in nature. On the other hand, the possibility to exchange and create tacit knowledge and the explorative nature of R&D cooperation provide firms with the opportunity to better access the broad knowledge base of universities, leading to product innovations with a higher degree of novelty.

The Mediator Role of Innovation Between University-Industry Collaboration and Firm Performance

“…Results reveal that UIC positively affects both product and process innovation. This finding is consistent with previous researches (Maietta, 2015;Kande et al, 2017;Vega-Jurado, Kask & Manjarrés-Henriquez, 2017). This result implies that firms should collaborate with universities to develop both product and process innovation.…”

How firms use coordination activities in university–industry collaboration: adjusting to or steering a research center?

“…We also conducted a cross-case comparison of the firms' goals and coordination activities in the observed phases to identify similarities and differences among the firms' goals and their activities over time (Eisenhardt, 1989). From this, we constructed a theoretical model on how firms with different goals adjusted to or steered the research center (Vega-Jurado et al, 2017). Lastly, we derived propositions to clarify our theoretical arguments.…”

“…While it is well documented that formal research centers can yield positive firm outcomes (Vega-Jurado et al, 2017), partners often experience challenges that inhibit effective UIC (Ambos et al, 2008;Bruneel et al, 2010;de Wit-de Vries et al, 2018) and technology transfer (Gilsing et al, 2011). These challenges are typically rooted in differences between partners, such as differences in their time and resource allocation, management styles (Morandi, 2013), languages, and goals (Harrison & Klein, 2007, Galán-Muros and Plewa, 2016, Ghauri & Rosendo-Rios, 2016, Holstein et al, 2018.…”

Cooperación Universidad - Empresa y su efecto sobre el Desempeño Innovador Empresarial

“…El contraste metodológico realizado entre los modelos Tobit y Probit (Wooldridge, 2010), muestra que la variable exógena de cooperación universidad empresa incide significativamente de forma directa en el desempeño innovador empresarial. Lo anterior es consistente con la literatura reciente (Vega-Jurado, et al, 2017) ya que la contribución directa de las universidades con la empresa es muy probable que esté altamente relacionada con un reducido número de sectores industriales, entre las empresas que tienen capacidad y entre las empresas que han adoptado un enfoque de búsqueda de innovación abierta (Castro et al, 2010;Laursen y Salter, 2004). Complementariamente, las técnicas econométricas (Wooldridge, 2010) muestran la incidencia directa que existe entre el tamaño empresarial con la probabilidad de cooperación con las universidad para el desarrollo de actividades de innovación (García, 2013;Laursen y Salter, 2004;Veugelers y Cassiman, 2005).…”