Industry-University Collaboration and Commercializing Chinese Corporate Innovation

David H. Hsu (), Po-Hsuan Hsu (), Kaiguo Zhou () and Tong Zhou ()
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David H. Hsu: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Po-Hsuan Hsu: College of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu City 300044, Taiwan
Kaiguo Zhou: School of Finance, Institute of Beijing Digital Economy and Development, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing 100070, China
Tong Zhou: School of Entrepreneurship and Management, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China; and College of Business, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China

Management Science, 2025, vol. 71, issue 6, 5351-5375

Abstract: We construct a comprehensive data set of medium- and large-sized industrial firms and research universities in China and examine how Chinese firms’ commercialization of their technologies is related to their experience in industry-university collaboration (IUC). We propose that firms’ IUC experience constitutes an inimitable complementary asset that facilitates their technology commercialization. Our empirical analyses show that firms generate more new product sales and produce more product-oriented patents when they have more patents that are coassigned to universities or when they have more academic publications coauthored with university staff in the past. Such a relation is strengthened when firms have higher absorptive capacity, when firms are in industries that depend more on basic science, and when firms are located closer to their collaborating universities. Additional tests point out four channels through which firms’ IUC experience benefits their technology commercialization: knowledge acquisition, talent recruiting, direct technology transfers, and technological complementarity.

Keywords: industry-university collaboration; corporate innovation; technology commercialization; technology transfer; complementarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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