R&D and Innovation Collaboration between Universities and Business—A PLS-SEM Model for the Spanish Province of Huelva

Juan J. García-Machado, Włodzimierz Sroka and Martyna Nowak
Additional contact information
Juan J. García-Machado: Department of Financial Economics, Accounting and Operations Management, University of Huelva, 21071 Huelva, Spain
Włodzimierz Sroka: Department of Management, WSB University, 41-300 Dąbrowa Górnicza, Poland
Martyna Nowak: Department of Applied Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

Administrative Sciences, 2021, vol. 11, issue 3, 1-27

Abstract: In the last decade we have witnessed a growing amount of interest for developing better ‘exchange’ between universities, research centres and technology parks and companies, governments and other institutions. The biggest aim of those projects is, on the one hand, to make sure that valuable research does not stay hidden in the ivory tower of academia, and, on the other, that there are clear indications for what kinds of solutions are needed in the market. Due to the lack of empirical research in the topic, the focus of this paper is to establish and explain which factors determine the demand for technological services and how they can contribute to the promotion of greater university–business collaboration in R&D and innovation. To achieve that goal, we applied the PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling) method in order to create a theoretical model, which was then verified through the application of the CTA (Confirmatory Tetrad Analysis) with the purpose of evaluating whether the specification of the chosen measurement model based on the theoretical rationale was supported by data. The test run was performed on 96 companies from the Spanish region of Huelva. It showed that only four of the considered factors, namely influence of the environment, market conditions, technology adoption decision and economic characteristics of the company, constituted 65.76% of the variance of the endogenous latent Demand for Technological Services. We believe that thanks to the proposed model and its adaptivity, it is possible to design relevant policies and undertakings aimed at promoting the research-business collaboration at the regional, national and international levels.

Keywords: technology demand; technology adoption; R&D collaboration; university; business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/11/3/83/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/11/3/83/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:11:y:2021:i:3:p:83-:d:615859

Access Statistics for this article

Administrative Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Nancy Ma

More articles in Administrative Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().