Industry-University Collaboration and Commercializing Chinese Corporate Innovation

Abstract

We construct a comprehensive data set of medium- and large-sized industrial firms and research universities in China and examine how Chinese firms’ commercialization of their technologies is related to their experience in industry-university collaboration (IUC). We propose that firms’ IUC experience constitutes an inimitable complementary asset that facilitates their technology commercialization. Our empirical analyses show that firms generate more new product sales and produce more product-oriented patents when they have more patents that are coassigned to universities or when they have more academic publications coauthored with university staff in the past. Such a relation is strengthened when firms have higher absorptive capacity, when firms are in industries that depend more on basic science, and when firms are located closer to their collaborating universities. Additional tests point out four channels through which firms’ IUC experience benefits their technology commercialization: knowledge acquisition, talent recruiting, direct technology transfers, and technological complementarity. This paper was accepted by Sridhar Tayur, entrepreneurship and innovation. Funding: D. H. Hsu acknowledges research support from the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the University of Pennsylvania. P.-H. Hsu acknowledges the Yushan Fellow Program by the Ministry of Education and National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan [MOE-108-YSFMS-0004-012-P1, NSTC 113-2410-H-007-008-MY3, MOST 109-2628-H-007-001-MY4] and the E.SUN Academic Award. K. Zhou acknowledges research support from the Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of China [Grant 20&ZD103], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71991474] and the 111 Project of China [Grant D23001]. T. Zhou acknowledges research support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72003206]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00788 .