Abstract
In the last decade we have witnessed a growing amount of interest for developing better ‘exchange’ between universities, research centres and technology parks and companies, governments and other institutions. The biggest aim of those projects is, on the one hand, to make sure that valuable research does not stay hidden in the ivory tower of academia, and, on the other, that there are clear indications for what kinds of solutions are needed in the market. Due to the lack of empirical research in the topic, the focus of this paper is to establish and explain which factors determine the demand for technological services and how they can contribute to the promotion of greater university–business collaboration in R&D and innovation. To achieve that goal, we applied the PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling) method in order to create a theoretical model, which was then verified through the application of the CTA (Confirmatory Tetrad Analysis) with the purpose of evaluating whether the specification of the chosen measurement model based on the theoretical rationale was supported by data. The test run was performed on 96 companies from the Spanish region of Huelva. It showed that only four of the considered factors, namely influence of the environment, market conditions, technology adoption decision and economic characteristics of the company, constituted 65.76% of the variance of the endogenous latent Demand for Technological Services. We believe that thanks to the proposed model and its adaptivity, it is possible to design relevant policies and undertakings aimed at promoting the research-business collaboration at the regional, national and international levels.
Highlights
The last decade has witnessed the increase of activities undertook by the scientific and research institutions in the developed countries with the objective of presenting their latest research results and practical solutions to governments, companies, and other institutions around the world, in order to find more sources of investment for the continuation of the projects and research
Given the lack of empirical studies on the subject, the objective of this work is to fill in the knowledge gap by discovering and explaining which factors determine companies’ demand for technological services, and in what way, and how this could contribute to the promotion of greater university–business collaborations in R&D
Despite that since 2016 it has been increasing, it is still far from the 3% target set by the EU in its Europe 2020 strategy and the countries of central and northern Europe that led this ranking (Spain occupies the 16th position)
Summary
The last decade has witnessed the increase of activities undertook by the scientific and research institutions in the developed countries (such as R&D centres, universities and technology parks) with the objective of presenting their latest research results and practical solutions to governments, companies, and other institutions around the world, in order to find more sources of investment for the continuation of the projects and research. The issue of broadly understood collaboration between business and science is one of the key issues constituting the foundations for the modern knowledge-based economy (Domanska 2018). The MINATEC innovation campus is home to 3000 researchers, 1200 students, and 600 business and technology transfer experts on a 20-hectare state-ofthe-art campus with 13,000 m2 of clean room space where it generates up to 350 patents and 1600 scientific articles every year (Allan et al 2019). The case of Spain seems to reflect this latest change quite clearly
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