Abstract
We examine the determinants of university involvement in knowledge transfer activities, focusing on the value of external services provided by higher education institutions. Data come from 164 universities in the UK and are drawn from the HE Business and Community Interaction Survey (HE-BCI), with a variety of university- and region- specific explanatory variables grafted onto the data from other official sources. The production function for such external services is estimated using the appropriate stochastic frontier methods, and unobserved heterogeneity across institutions of higher education is accommodated by adopting a latent class framework for the modelling. We find strong effects of scale and of research orientation on the level of knowledge transfer. There are, however, two distinct latent classes of higher education institutions, and these differ especially in terms of how external service provision responds to subject specialization of universities and to economic conditions in the region. Research-intensive universities are concentrated in one of the latent classes and, in these institutions, the provision of external services appears to be highly efficient, while in the second latent class there is greater variation in the efficiency of universities.
Highlights
The transfer of knowledge between universities and other actors in an economy–business, government, media and the public–is a core driver of innovation (Mueller, 2006)
The present paper focuses on the evaluation of efficiency in university-industry collaboration (UIC); we seek to establish the factors that influence the extent of such collaboration, and to identify players that are successful in converting these factors into positive outcomes
The findings suggest the existence of different models of UIC based on the characteristics of higher education institutions
Summary
The transfer of knowledge between universities and other actors in an economy–business, government, media and the public–is a core driver of innovation (Mueller, 2006). The European Patent Office (EPO) reports that patent applications from universities increased more than fivefold between 1992 and 2014, and a still faster growth rate is shown for joint applications with industry (Eurostat, 2020) Consistent with these data, the OECD reports that the share of businesses collaborating with HEIs has substantially grown in recent years, with an average share of around 14% in 2016 (see Fig. 1). This expansion in the engagement of universities with society has been encouraged by governments through financial and regulatory policy instruments. Policy instruments have fostered the diffusion of new intermediary organisations, such as business incubators, R&D centres for science-industry collaboration and regional technology transfer organisations (OECD, 2019)
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