How the Benefits, Results and Barriers of Collaboration Affect University Engagement with Industry

Abstract

Literature has been paying greater attention to the main drivers of academic researchers’ engagement with industrial partners. However, there is a lack of understanding of how academic researchers’ perceived outcomes and constraints affect their collaboration with firms. The novelty of this article is its analysis of how researchers’ perception of the benefits, results, and barriers associated with collaboration affects academic research groups’ engagement with industry. We use a comprehensive database on university–industry collaboration from a survey with academic researcher groups in Brazil, and we use a time lag to analyse the number of collaboration of the research groups. We find that perceived intellectual benefits and commercial results are important drivers for researchers’ engagement with industry, and economic benefits and transactional barriers are obstacles to increase collaborative projects with firms.