Abstract
This work explores the role of university department characteristics in academic engagement with industry. In particular, we investigate the role played by research quality and previous experience in academic engagement across different scientific disciplines. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of public sponsored university-industry partnerships in the United Kingdom, combined with data from the UK Research Assessment Exercises 2001 and 2008. Our analysis reveals a negative link between academic quality and the level of engagement with industry for departments in the basic sciences and a positive relationship for departments in the applied sciences. Our results further show that the role of research quality for academic engagement strictly depends on the level of the department’s previous experience in university-industry partnerships, notably in the basic sciences, where experience acts as a moderating factor. The findings of this work are highly relevant for policy makers and university managers and contribute to the innovation literature focused on the investigation of the determinants of valuable knowledge transfer practices in academia.
Highlights
Universities are key agents of economic and social progress
This paper investigated the relationship between university departments’ characteristics and academic engagement with businesses in the form of U–I collaboration
We focussed on the role of the quality profile of academic departments and on their cumulated experience in academic engagement as determinants of the extent of involvement in U–I collaboration
Summary
Universities are key agents of economic and social progress. Their mission has gradually been extended to interactions with industry, and with society more generally, beyond the traditional goals of teaching and research (e.g. Bercovitz & Feldman, 2006; Archibugi & Filippetti, 2018; Giuri et al, 2019). Whilst university IPR-related activities and academic entrepreneurship have attracted major attention both within the academic literature and the policy community (Phan & Siegel, 2006; Rothaermel et al, 2007; O’Shea et al, 2008), other types of university–industry (U–I) interaction have become more prevalent (Perkmann et al, 2013) This is notably the case of research partnerships, which refer to a specific typology of university interaction with industry entailing firms and university joint research and financial effort within a specific collaborative project (e.g. D’Este & Iammarino, 2010; Scandura, 2016).
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