Impact of university-industry collaborative research with different dimensions on university patent commercialisation

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the impact of university-industry collaborative research with different dimensions on university patent commercialisation and offer suggestions to promote patent commercialisation. University-industry collaborative research is measured by the university-industry collaborative patent application. Collaboration breadth and depth are defined. The theories about the impacts of the collaboration breadth and depth on university patent commercialisation are analysed and the hypotheses are proposed accordingly. We explore the impacts by negative binomial regression with the panel data set constructed from the patent data of the ‘double first-class’ universities in China during 2015–2017. Results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the collaboration breadth and the university patent commercialisation. Nevertheless, the collaboration depth has no impact on university patent commercialisation. And surprisingly, the interaction of breadth and depth shows a negative impact on it. Suggestions are offered that universities should avoid collaborating with industry inordinately and pay attention to balance breadth and depth of the collaboration with industry, improving the quality of the collaboration and promoting patent commercialisation.