Does teaching benefit from university–industry collaboration? Investigating the role of academic commercialization and engagement

Abstract

With the incorporation of universities' third mission into their traditional teaching and academic research activities, there has been a burgeoning literature on how the third mission influences universities' academic research, though there is little research on its impact on universities' traditional mission--teaching. This study thus intends to strengthen our understanding of the relationships among universities' three missions by examining the relationship between university and industry collaboration and university teaching performance. Thanks to a unique combined dataset from 61 universities from 2009 to 2013, empirical results indicate that there are distinct effects of collaboration channels on teaching performance. Specifically, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between academic commercialization and teaching performance, while there is a U-shaped relationship between academic engagement and teaching performance. Academic commercialization and engagement yield a combined positive effect on teaching.