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Review of Regional Research

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14-08-2019 | Original Paper

University-industry collaborations—The key to radical innovations?

Authors: William Arant, Dirk Fornahl, Nils Grashof, Kolja Hesse, Cathrin Söllner

Published in: Review of Regional Research | Issue 2/2019

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Abstract

Radical innovations are an important factor for long-term economic growth. Universities provide basic research and knowledge that form the basis for future innovations. Previous research has investigated the effects of universities, university-industry partnerships and proximity on factors such as innovations, knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurial activities, as well as regional growth, wealth and competitiveness. However, the role that university-industry collaborations play in radical innovations, mediated by various measures of proximity such as cognitive or geographic distance, has not yet been explored. With this study, we illuminate the conditions under which university-industry collaborations are the key to radical innovations in German firms.

Combining firm, patent and subsidy data, we built a data set consisting of 8404 firms that patented between the years 2012 and 2014. Based on the patent data, we identified the emergence of radical innovations by using new technology combinations as a proxy for (radical) novelty. As our main independent variables, we computed the cognitive distance of firms, universities and research institutions as well as the geographic distance between these partners. We identified formal relationships through publicly supported R&D collaborations between universities, firms, and research institutions using the German subsidy catalogue.

Our research is vital for understanding the conditions under which university-industry collaborations contribute to the creation of radical innovations. While not only closing a research gap, this paper has practical ramifications for companies, universities as well as policy-makers by evaluating the concrete effects of university-industry collaborations on the probability to generate radical innovations.

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Hence, this aggregation level includes 403,860 potential linkages.

More specifically, these ministries are the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs (BMWi), Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development (BMVBS), the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture (BMEL) and Consumer Protection.

Thereby we employed the R package “geosphere”.

The social security statute book also refers to this definition when talking about commuter structures.

As a further sensitivity analysis, we also reduced our sample to those organizations that executed patent activities in the years 2012–2014 and at the same time received only R&D co-funding. The corresponding results remain stable and can be provided upon request.

The different firm-size categories are defined according to the European Commission Recommendation of 6 May 2003 (http://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/business-friendly-environment/sme-definition_de).

For an overview the share of all innovations (not just radical innovations), please see Appendix Fig. 3.

To verify the graphical results, we also did proportion tests, which indicate that the proportion of radical innovations is significantly higher in the group of firms that received funding (single or co-funding). The corresponding results can be provided upon request.

By additionally testing differences in the corresponding means, the presented results can be further strengthened as evidence is found that significant differences between the three independent variables exist. The corresponding results can be provided upon request.

Cognitively close collaborations are not illustrated because they perfectly predict failure.

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Title: University-industry collaborations—The key to radical innovations?
Authors: William Arant
Dirk Fornahl
Nils Grashof
Kolja Hesse
Cathrin Söllner
Publication date: 14-08-2019
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Review of Regional Research / Issue 2/2019
Print ISSN: 0173-7600
Electronic ISSN: 1613-9836
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10037-019-00133-3

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