دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله بررسی تاثیر نزدیکی جغرافیایی و کیفیت دانشگاه بر همکاری دانشگاه و صنعت (نشریه تیلور و فرانسیس 2011)

بررسی تاثیر نزدیکی جغرافیایی و کیفیت دانشگاه بر همکاری دانشگاه و صنعت در انگلستان

Exploring the Effect of Geographical Proximity and University Quality on University–Industry Collaboration in the United Kingdom

Laursen K., Reichstein T. and Salter A. Exploring the effect of geographical proximity and university quality on university–industry collaboration in the United Kingdom, Regional Studies. This paper concerns the geographical distance between a firm and the universities in its local area. It is argued that firms’ decisions to collaborate with universities for innovation are influenced by both geographical proximity to universities and the quality of these universities. The findings show that being located close to a lower-tier university reduces the propensity for firms to collaborate locally, while co-location with top-tier universities promotes collaboration. However, it is also found that if faced with the choice, firms appear to give preference to the research quality of the university partner over geographical closeness. This is particularly true for high-research and development intensive firms.

1 Introduction

Universities play diverse roles in the economic system: they educate and train talented problem-solvers; they are the setting for most of the basic research undertaken in the economy; they provide cultural amenities to a local area; and they are sites, in their own right, of important economic activity (BOK, 2003; CHARLES, 2006). Given these roles, universities, which are often seen as crucial resource endowments within regions, are central to the creation and support of regional competitive advantages (GODDARD and CHATTERTON, 1999). Universities also may provide direct assistance to industrial firms in their innovative activities, providing advice, contacts or even ideas that can help firms to identify and incorporate valuable external knowledge into their innovation processes (CHESBROUGH et al., 2006; MOWERY et al., 2001). Research shows that firms with the ability to build links with university research may conduct more productive technological search (FLEMING and SORENSON, 2004), gain higher status and value from the commercial exploitation of their knowledge (ZUCKER et al., 1998), and even may be more likely to innovate (FELDMAN, 1994).

Given the importance of universities for innovation, there has been much research effort to understand better the determinants of university–industry relationships (for example, AGRAWAL and HENDERSON, 2002; BEISE and STAHL, 1999; COHEN et al., 2002; HENDERSON et al., 1998; JAFFE et al., 1993; LAURSEN and SALTER, 2004; LINK and SCOTT, 2005; MOHNEN and HOAREAU, 2003; MUELLER, 2006; PAVITT, 1991; and ROSENBERG, 1990). This body of work explores the range of factors and motivations that lead some firms towork with universities. It examines the character of the relationships between universities and industrial firms, including the types of knowledge exchanged in the innovation process. A part of this broad literature focuses on the geography of university–industry relationships (for example, ABRAMOVSKY et al., 2007; ARUNDEL and GEUNA, 2004; BRAUNERHJELM, 2008; BRESCHI and LISSONI, 2001; FELDMAN, 1994; JAFFE, 1989; and MANSFIELD and LEE, 1996). This subset of the literature examines the important positive aspects of geographical proximity between firms and universities.

While it is not disputed that geography is an important determinant of firms’ collaborative behaviour for innovation, this paper argues and substantiates empirically that the relationship between geographical proximity to a university and a firm’s propensity to collaborate with a local university in the innovation process is influenced by both physical distance and the research quality of the local university. It is argued that a firm’s decision to collaborate with its local university is more likely if this is one of the top-tier universities. Accordingly, it can be conjectured that geographical distance to the nearest top-tier university is positively related to the firm’s propensities to collaborate with a local university, and that there is no or even a negative relationship between geographical distance to the nearest low-tier university and the propensity to collaborate locally. Based on three ‘classes’ of universities in terms of research quality, this paper provides overall empirical support for these ideas. Yet, while the findings indicate that the first-best choice – from the firms’ point of view – is to collaborate with a local, top-tier university, in the absence of a high-quality local university, the second-best choice would seem to be collaborating with a non-local (presumably high-quality) university rather than cooperating with a local, lower-tier university. In addition, this study shows that firm–university relationships are moderated by research and development (R&D) intensity: firms with above-average R&D intensity are less prone to collaborate with (high-quality) local universities compared with firms with below-average R&D intensity. In other words, geographical proximity matters more for firms with lower absorptive capacity.

The empirical approach in the present paper involves combining data from a number of rich sources, including the 4thUK InnovationSurvey, the UK’s ResearchAssessment Exercise (RAE) 2001, and information on regional economic and labour resources. In order to calculate geographical distances, postcode grid data from GRIDLINK and Euclidean geometry are employed. The means of estimation is a nested logit model. The paper is structured as follows. The next section reviews the extant literature and produces a set of theoretical expectations. This is followed by a section that describes the data and methodology; and a results section. The final section provides conclusions and a discussion.