University-Industry Collaboration in terms of Smart Specialisation concept

Author: Irina Olshankaya

In this paper I examined the relation between university-industry collaboration and firms’ performance using Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data for 14 European countries. The analysis includes two priority sectors, which are defined in terms of Smart Specialization innovation concept: Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Enhancement of Resources.

Smart Specialization is a new innovation concept designed to promote the efficient and effective use of public investment in research and is a central focus of Europe 2020 Strategy.  Its goal is to stimulate regional innovation by enabling regions to identify sectors of competitive advantage and then focus their regional policies on promoting innovation in these fields in order to achieve economic growth (EC, 2010). 

In Estonia there were indicated three main growth areas on the basis of qualitative analysis carried out by Estonian Development Fund (Estonian Development Fund, 2013):

• Information and Communication technology (ICT) 

• Enhancement of resources

• Health technologies and services

The main idea is that knowledge that is related to different types of innovations, could be transferred using the linkages between universities, government, public or private research institutes and private enterprises. Hence, both parties involved in this process, private enterprises from one side and universities, government, public or private research institutes from another side should be interested and have clear motivation to collaborate with each other.

The main contribution of this work is to provide some new empirical insights into understanding of firms’ motivation to collaborate with research institutes, by answering the questions: what is the relation between university-industry collaboration and firms’ performance? Whether different types of collaboration have positive relation to firms’ performance measured by total turnover and turnover from innovative sales or there is no clear linkage between firms’ performance and collaboration with research institutes?

Standard ordinary least squares (OLS) and tobit models are the utilized statistical techniques used on the firm level data, with a dependent variables indicating total turnover and turnover from innovative sales. The models incorporate the cooperation variables as well as size indicator and control variables that could be related to firms’ performance.

Main findings reveal that the cooperation with foreign universities is positively related to firms’ performance; at the same time collaboration with national universities does not have such relation. Results differ across countries among analyzed types of cooperation in considered priority sectors.