Abstract
University-industry collaborations (UICs) are one of the main sources of external knowledge and technologies for industrial firms, particularly in the context of emerging markets (EMs) and firm development. It is thus highly relevant to identify potential barriers internal to the firm as well as in the regional innovation system that might prevent firms from using UICs for innovation, in particular in an EM context. In order to address this issue, we conduct a firm-level study of the R&D-related segment of the manufacturing industry in Istanbul. Logistic regression analysis is used to test the effect of potential barriers on using UICs for innovative activities. With this approach, we are able to identify barriers that prevent innovation-related UICs and thus form a bottleneck to collaborations in the first place. Our findings show that lack of information about UIC opportunities as well as lack of financial support for UICs are the most relevant barriers that inhibit firms’ usage of UICs for innovation. This firm-level evidence points out the importance of university technology transfer offices in regional innovation systems and for fruitful UICs. We further find that administrative barriers have no significant effect, while barriers related to trust and skill matching with scientific partners even have a reverse effect to what we would have expected from the literature. This finding might point towards an effect of perceived versus deterring barriers that has been observed in innovation studies before and might be relevant for studying UICs as well.
Highlights
University–industry collaborations (UICs) are one of the most important interactions for transferring knowledge or technologies, stimulating growth and improving innovative activities
Additional barriers are the costs for firms to search partners that are willing to collaborate and that have a fitting level of skills as well as the costs that are related to the collaboration itself (Bruneel et al, 2010; D’Este et al, 2014; Garcia et al, 2019; Temel & Glassman, 2013)
It is important to address potential barriers to UICs which is of particular concern in emerging markets (EMs) as UICs are discussed as an important external knowledge source to improve the innovative performance of firms in such contexts (Bastos et al, 2014; Guerrero et al, 2019; Mathews & Hu, 2007)
Summary
University–industry collaborations (UICs) are one of the most important interactions for transferring knowledge or technologies, stimulating growth and improving innovative activities. It is highly relevant to extend existing knowledge towards explorative studies from EMs to understand different experiences on the basis of varying institutional contexts and diverse economic structures (Cetindamar et al, 2009; Kruss & Visser, 2017) and be able to inform policy in respective economies (Filippetti & Savona, 2017) This is even more important considering the fact that EMs will play a major role in the future globalized economy, meaning that we need to learn more about these diverse settings and further develop the field of EM research (Nielsen et al, 2018) as well as expanding or enriching existing theories in new ways (Ramamurti, 2016). Results are discussed, limitations are outlined and economic, managerial and policy implications are drawn
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