Persistence in University-Industry Collaboration on Innovation

Promoting university-industry collaboration on innovation plays an important role in innovation policy. Several studies focus on characterising firms that collaborate with universities, but they tend to treat universities as a uniform entity and do not distinguish between factors that are associated with initiating and persistently collaborating with the same university on innovation. This paper addresses this gap in the innovation literature by studying firms’ collaboration with specific universities.
The paper applies unique innovation survey data on firms’ collaboration on innovation with specific universities in Denmark combined with detailed register-based information on firms and their employees. The analysis draws on a balanced panel of 1797 firms in Denmark from two consecutive innovation surveys covering 2009-11 and 2012-14. Firms’ collaborations with two specific technically oriented universities located in a peripheral and metropolitan region, respectively, are explored.
The study finds a partial overlap between factors associated with initiating a university-industry collaboration and collaborating persistently. However, differences are also detected, and these mainly appear to be related to the type of region the collaborating university is located in.