Firms’ innovation and university cooperation. New evidence from a survey of Italian firms
利用意大利央行2007-2010年企业调查数据，研究发现大学合作并不增加企业引入技术创新的概率，但能促进同时涉及组织和技术变革的联合创新。
Abstract In this article, we investigate whether the cooperation with universities may stimulate the innovative performance of Italian firms. We use a dataset merging information from two different surveys carried out by the Bank of Italy between 2007 and 2010. We derive our results using a two-stage procedure with the aim of ruling out spurious correlations due to the existence of omitted variables. Results show that the cooperation with universities does not affect the likelihood of firms introducing technological innovations. However, when we distinguish between pure technological innovation outcomes (only new products and/or productive processes) and joint innovation outcomes, which involve both organizational and technological changes, we find that only the latter is positively stimulated by the cooperation with universities. These findings are promising since, according to the innovation management literature, joint innovation activities are more successful in transferring new ideas and new business opportunities into market success.