Abstract
There is now substantial evidence of the positive contribution universities can make to helping firms’ innovation. Building university-business collaborations, however, confronts the ‘two-worlds’ paradox, and the difference in institutional logics and priorities between businesses and universities. Here, we consider whether firms’ experience from prior collaboration can generate learning which can help to overcome the two-worlds paradox and improve firms’ ability to generate new-to-the-market innovations in collaboration with universities. Our analysis is based on panel data for UK companies and controls for the decision to innovate. We find evidence of significant learning effects which both increase the probability that firms collaborating with universities are able to develop new-to-the-market innovations and then benefit from those innovations. For smaller firms learning effects are strongest from prior collaboration with customers, while for medium and larger firms the strongest learning effects arise from prior collaboration with consultants.
Highlights
There is substantial evidence from a range of countries on the positive role of universities in helping firms to innovate successfully (Petruzzelli, 2011; Laursen and Salter, 2004; Mansfield, 1995; Bellucci and Pennacchio, 2016)
16 Filters included in the UK Innovation Survey (UKIS) mean that questions on collaboration for innovation are only asked of firms which undertook some innovation in products or services, or processes in the period covered by the survey
We use two different dependent variables to explore the role of learning from prior collaboration on the success of university-business collaborations in generating (a) new-to-the-market innovations and (b) related sales
Summary
There is substantial evidence from a range of countries on the positive role of universities in helping firms to innovate successfully (Petruzzelli, 2011; Laursen and Salter, 2004; Mansfield, 1995; Bellucci and Pennacchio, 2016). Building university-business relationships confronts what Hall (2003) describes as the ‘two-worlds’ paradox, and the difference in institutional logics and priorities between businesses and universities (Dasgupta and David, 1994) This creates ‘orientation-related barriers’ and ‘transaction-related barriers’ to university-business collaboration reflected in conflicts over the creation or exploitation of knowledge, the timeliness (Hamisah et al, 2010) as well as the time-horizon of research projects (Dunowski et al, 2010), the prioritization and management of intellectual property (IP) and the bureaucracy of university administration (Bruneel et al, 2010). Two main learning mechanisms are envisaged in existing studies: the possibility that firms may become better at managing or structuring external collaboration; and, the possibility that experience may enhance firms’ cognitive capacity to absorb external knowledge extending the number of useful collaborations (Laursen and Salter, 2006; Leiponen and Helfat, 2010). Our results do not resolve the two-worlds paradox but do suggest that firms with prior experience of innovation collaboration may be better able to resolve at least part of the paradox when it arises
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