University-industry collaboration: do the characteristics of academic staff matter?

It is widely recognised that a country’s development, in terms of innovation and productivity, is greatly influenced by the character and intensity of interaction between the science and business communities. Despite this importance, there is still a lack of understanding regarding the underlying factors that drive the transfer of knowledge and technology. In particular, only a few empirical studies have addressed the issue of exploring the attitudes and behaviours of academic staff in this process. This paper aims to fill this research caveat. Its main objective is to investigate the influence of academic staff’s socio-demographic and educational characteristics on university-industry collaboration. According to our objectives and to test these hypotheses, we decided on a mixed method. At a first stage, we performed a quantitative study, based on data gathered from a questionnaire applied to the overall population of academic staff at Bragança Polytechnic Institute in Portugal. The empirical study was carried out in 2011 and covered the total population of academic staff at BPI. We received 123 valid questionnaires, yielding a response rate of 23.7%. For data analysis, we applied descriptive statistics and logistic regression. At a second stage, a qualitative approach was chosen to evaluate university-industry collaboration, consisting of an exploratory semi-structured interview with the owner-manager of a recently created local spin-off from this higher education institution. The results reveal that age and gender are significantly related to the propensity to collaborate with industry. For instance, the probability of male academic staff collaborating with the business community is around 3.5 times higher than it is for females. Furthermore, we found that the level of formal qualification of academic staff and supervision of work placements had no influence, while the school/faculty academic staff belong to is significantly correlated with industry cooperation. Nevertheless, the interviewee considered the existence of curricular work placement as crucial. Overall, from our quantitative and qualitative data, there is a preference for exploitation of knowledge more in academic than in business terms. We present several theoretical and practical implications