Academic knowledge as a driver for technological innovation? Comparing universities, small and large firms in knowledge production and dissemination

Friedrich Dornbusch and Peter Neuhäusler

No 37, Discussion Papers "Innovation Systems and Policy Analysis" from Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI)

Abstract: It is generally claimed that universities provide the scientific basis for future technological progress. Still, empirical evidence of the impact of direct links between universities and firms remains weak and is often at least inconsistent. This paper aims at contributing to the literature by analyzing how direct academic involvement affects the output of inventive activities of research teams in different organizational backgrounds. By applying a unique dataset of German academic and corporate patents, we find that boundary-spanning knowledge production with academic inventors raises the innovative performance of SMEs and MNEs. Furthermore, geographical proximity between team members is generally shown to be valuable for team performance in terms of the influence on future technological developments. At the same time, the results indicate that academic involvement helps inventor teams to profit from spatially distant knowledge sources.

Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-edu, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-hrm, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm and nep-sbm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:fisidp:37

DOI: 10.24406/publica-fhg-296532

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