Abstract
Using large-scale survey data for firms located in Portugal, we analyze which firm characteristics are conducive to establishing contacts with universities. Although almost half of the firms surveyed stated they had established some contacts with universities in the period 2001-2003, only a few (22%) consider universities an important source of knowledge and information for their innovation activities. Our analysis indicates that the firms’ propensity to draw on each of the Portuguese universities is explained by the characteristics of the different firms and their regional and industrial patterns. An unambiguous and statistically robust finding is that proximity matters highly in firms-universities linkages – our estimations reveal that firms are more likely to contacts universities located nearby.
Highlights
The importance of the traditional university is well documented in the literature (Geiger, 1993; Bok, 2003)
While universities have long served as a source of technological advances for industry, university-industry collaboration has intensified in recent years due to four interrelated factors (Bercovitz and Feldmann, 2006): the development of new, high-opportunity technology platforms such as computer science, molecular biology and material science; the more general growing scientific and technical content of all types of industrial production; the need for new sources of funding for academic research brought on by severe budgetary restrictions; and the prominence of government policies aimed at raising the economic returns of publicly funded research by stimulating university technology-transfer (Geuna, 1998)
Local proximity lowers the search costs for both firms and students. This may lead to some competitive advantage over similar firms, which are not located close to universities, especially when high skilled labor is a scarce resource and there is intense competition about high potentials. It has been clear over the last decades that the innovation process is not the result of isolated agents
Summary
The importance of the traditional university is well documented in the literature (Geiger, 1993; Bok, 2003) Their primary mission is to engage in research and disseminate knowledge across both academic and student communities. Some have raised the concern that universities are being asked to deviate from an historically successful role and that increased commercial influences may destroy the norms of open science that have promoted the national interest (Nelson, 2001) These same concerns may be raised at the regional level. Proximity to basic science is reported by Cohen (1995) to be one of the main determinants of innovation Governments in their quest to maximize the social return of innovation should be concerned with fostering such links between private firms and universities.
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