University industry links and product innovation: cooperate or contract?

Jaider Vega-Jurado,Sean Kask,Liney Manjarrés-Henriquez

doi:10.4067/s0718-27242017000300001

Abstract

The role of universities in product innovation has received considerable attention over the past decade. However, little is known about how the type of formal university-firm interaction predicts innovative performance and the degree of novelty of new products. This research differentiates two forms of firm high-relational interaction with universities: R&D contracting and cooperation. We exploit the panel structure of a dataset of 5,858 Spanish manufacturing firms with fixed-effects models. The empirical analysis finds that, although both contracting and cooperation predict product innovative performance, the two activities differ in the degree of novelty of new product outcomes. The implications are that the codified nature and asymmetric scope of R&D contracting is more suitable for exploitative innovation, resulting in product innovation that is incremental in nature. On the other hand, the possibility to exchange and create tacit knowledge and the explorative nature of R&D cooperation provide firms with the opportunity to better access the broad knowledge base of universities, leading to product innovations with a higher degree of novelty

Highlights

The academic literature consistently emphasizes that firms rarely innovate alone and that the development of new products increasingly depends on the firm’s capacity to access and exploit external sources of technological knowledge (Laursen and Salter, 2006)
The present study addresses the following questions: (1) Are high-relational research interactions with universities (R&D contracting and cooperation) significant predictors of firm innovative performance? (2) If so, how do R&D contracting and cooperation with universities differ in terms of the novelty of product innovation and knowledge generated? In so doing this study makes several contributions to the literature
Keeping in mind that the PITEC draws from a subset of R&D active firms in the national innovation survey, 12.7% of the innovation-oriented firms engaged in active cooperation with universities

Summary

Introduction

The academic literature consistently emphasizes that firms rarely innovate alone and that the development of new products increasingly depends on the firm’s capacity to access and exploit external sources of technological knowledge (Laursen and Salter, 2006). Among the wide variety of agents with which firms can relate, universities have taken pride of place as partners, and academic research has come to be considered as one of the engines of industrial innovation (Perkman et al, 2013) Based on this belief, many OECD governments have launched, starting from the late 1970s, important initiatives to encourage greater interaction between universities and firms. University-industry links may involve a number of different organizational arrangements, ranging from collaborative research to temporary personnel exchanges In this sense, our knowledge on the role of universities in industrial innovation is still limited since much of the existing research focuses on low-relational activities, such as patenting and licensing, while largely neglecting the linkages that are more intensive and used by firms more often, such as joint research and contract research (D’Este and Patel, 2007). While some studies show that university-industry links positively affect firms’ innovative performance (Aschhoff and Schmidt, 2008; Bellucci and Pennacchio, 2016), others reveal an insignificant or even negative relationship (Miotti and Sachwald, 2003; Tsai and Wang, 2009)

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