Chapter 9 : Firm Size and Openness : The Driving Forces of University-Industry Collaboration
Résumé
The discussion of university-industry relationships, which entered the policy arena in the early 1980s, has become the property of both academics and the general public. An enormous number of contributions to academic writings and articles in the business and public press have come from policy makers in the last few years in a bid to explain, justify and regulate the interactions between universities and firms. At the European level, very few of these works have been supported by systematic data analysis. If we exclude the results of the Policies, Appropriability and Competitiveness for European Enterprises (PACE) questionnaire (which focused on large EU R&D intensive firms) and the scant information on the role of universities and public research centres available from Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) I, II and III, there is little evidence left.1 In a few European countries in recent years, country-specific data have been gathered and analysed. For example, the studies of Meyer-Krahmer and Schmoch (1998) and Beise and Stahl (1999) provide interesting evidence of the contribution of public research to industrial innovation in Germany.
