Barriers to university–industry collaboration in an emerging market

Firm-level evidence from Turkey

authored by: Timo Kleiner-Schäfer, Kerstin J. Schaefer
Abstract: University-industry collaborations (UICs) are one of the main sources of external knowledge and technologies for industrial firms, particularly in the context of emerging markets (EMs) and firm development. It is thus highly relevant to identify potential barriers internal to the firm as well as in the regional innovation system that might prevent firms from using UICs for innovation, in particular in an EM context. In order to address this issue, we conduct a firm-level study of the R&D-related segment of the manufacturing industry in Istanbul. Logistic regression analysis is used to test the effect of potential barriers on using UICs for innovative activities. With this approach, we are able to identify barriers that prevent innovation-related UICs and thus form a bottleneck to collaborations in the first place. Our findings show that lack of information about UIC opportunities as well as lack of financial support for UICs are the most relevant barriers that inhibit firms’ usage of UICs for innovation. This firm-level evidence points out the importance of university technology transfer offices in regional innovation systems and for fruitful UICs. We further find that administrative barriers have no significant effect, while barriers related to trust and skill matching with scientific partners even have a reverse effect to what we would have expected from the literature. This finding might point towards an effect of perceived versus deterring barriers that has been observed in innovation studies before and might be relevant for studying UICs as well.
Organisation(s): Institute of Economic and Human Geography
External Organisation(s): London School of Economics and Political Science
Philipps-Universität Marburg
Type: Article
Journal: The journal of technology transfer
Volume: 47
Pages: 872-905
No. of pages: 34
ISSN: 0892-9912
Publication date: 06.2022
Publication status: Published
Peer reviewed: Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas: Business and International Management, Accounting, General Engineering
Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
Electronic version(s): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-022-09919-z (Access: Open)