Does Affective Evaluation Matter for the Success of University-Business Collaborations?

Abstract

University-business collaborative projects play a crucial role in the knowledge-based economy. While university-business collaborations are perceived to be challenging owing to inherent differences between collaborators, past research has paid surprisingly little attention to the relationship between the collaborators’ affective evaluation of the project and collaboration outcomes, including the decision to engage in future collaborations. By performing sentiment analysis on a dataset of 415 final reports from university-business collaborative projects, we find that the collaborators’ positive affective evaluation of the project is positively correlated with its perceived benefit, which is a predictor of future collaboration. Moreover, positive affective evaluation moderates the negative effect of perceived challenges of the collaboration on its perceived benefits. These findings highlight the importance of managing perception and affective evaluation to promote successful university-business collaborations. They also showcase sentiment analysis as a helpful foresight tool to identify collaborations that are more likely to sustain in the future.