University-industry collaborations—The key to radical innovations?

Universität-Industrie-Kooperationen – Der Schlüssel zu radikalen Innovationen?

William Arant (), Dirk Fornahl (), Nils Grashof (), Kolja Hesse () and Cathrin Söllner ()
Additional contact information
William Arant: University of Bremen
Nils Grashof: University of Bremen
Kolja Hesse: University of Bremen
Cathrin Söllner: University of Bremen

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, 2019, vol. 39, issue 2, No 2, 119-141

Abstract: Abstract Radical innovations are an important factor for long-term economic growth. Universities provide basic research and knowledge that form the basis for future innovations. Previous research has investigated the effects of universities, university-industry partnerships and proximity on factors such as innovations, knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurial activities, as well as regional growth, wealth and competitiveness. However, the role that university-industry collaborations play in radical innovations, mediated by various measures of proximity such as cognitive or geographic distance, has not yet been explored. With this study, we illuminate the conditions under which university-industry collaborations are the key to radical innovations in German firms. Combining firm, patent and subsidy data, we built a data set consisting of 8404 firms that patented between the years 2012 and 2014. Based on the patent data, we identified the emergence of radical innovations by using new technology combinations as a proxy for (radical) novelty. As our main independent variables, we computed the cognitive distance of firms, universities and research institutions as well as the geographic distance between these partners. We identified formal relationships through publicly supported R&D collaborations between universities, firms, and research institutions using the German subsidy catalogue. Our research is vital for understanding the conditions under which university-industry collaborations contribute to the creation of radical innovations. While not only closing a research gap, this paper has practical ramifications for companies, universities as well as policy-makers by evaluating the concrete effects of university-industry collaborations on the probability to generate radical innovations.

Keywords: Radical innovations; Cognitive distance; Geographic distance; University-industry collaboration; 031; 032; 034 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10037-019-00133-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jahrfr:v:39:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s10037-019-00133-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10037

DOI: 10.1007/s10037-019-00133-3

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft is currently edited by Thomas Brenner and Georg Hirte

More articles in Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft from Springer, Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().