TY - JOUR

T1 - Barriers to university–industry collaboration in an emerging market

T2 - Firm-level evidence from Turkey

AU - Kleiner-Schäfer, Timo

AU - Schaefer, Kerstin J.

N1 - Funding Information: We greatly appreciate financial support for research stays in Turkey from the German Academic Exchange Service. Special thanks to Professor Ekrem Tatoğlu for survey sampling, data collection and very helpful discussions. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Professor Ingo Liefner for his important feedback and suggestions. Furthermore, thanks to our student assistant Jana Almstedt for data cleaning. Last but not least, thanks to Zoë Vercelli and Kerry Jago for language editing.

PY - 2022/6

Y1 - 2022/6

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Barrier

KW - Emerging market

KW - Innovation

KW - Research and development

KW - Turkey

KW - University–industry collaboration

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124265621&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s10961-022-09919-z

DO - 10.1007/s10961-022-09919-z

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85124265621

VL - 47

SP - 872

EP - 905

JO - The journal of technology transfer

JF - The journal of technology transfer

SN - 0892-9912

IS - 3

ER -