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Empirical study on influence of university-industry collaboration on research performance and moderating effect of social capital: evidence from engineering academics in China

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Abstract

The influence of university-industry collaboration on research performance and the moderating effect of social capital were empirically examined using a dataset of 804 engineering academics of Harbin institute of technology, with social capital in terms of network ties and tie strength. It was found that the intensity of university-industry collaboration had a negative effect on academics’ research performance (h-index), and tie strength had its positive moderation effect, which did not support the moderation effect of network ties. It is therefore concluded that university administrators should not make policies to encourage researchers to seek collaborations with industry without due consideration of research performance, while researchers with high strength of relationships should be encouraged to participate in university-industry collaboration.

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Notes

  1. In this study, we use h-index defined by Jorge E. Hirsch to measure research performance of academics. According to Hirsch, a scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np − h) papers have ≤h citations each (Hirsch 2005).

  2. Our notion of “university-industry collaboration intensity” is inspired by the notion of “degree of research collaboration” defined by Subramanyam (1983) in bibliometric studies. Subramanyam defined degree of research collaboration as the number of multi-coauthored papers out of the total number of papers.

  3. Most studies have found that social capital has positive effect on research performance, but some studies argue that the relationship is invert-u shape or not all dimensions of social capital have positive effect, such as Mcfadyen and Cannella (2004) and Gonzalez-Brambila et al. (2013).

  4. Formed in 2009, the C9 League is modelled on the American Ivy League. Comprising China’s most renowned and oldest universities, it is an alliance of nine universities in Chinese mainland: Tsinghua University, Peking University, Harbin institute of Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Xi’an Jiaotong University (Yang and Xie 2015).

  5. The data comes from China’s official annual report, Chinese University Science and Technology Development Annual Report during 2008–2015. X axis indicates the years from 2007 to 2014, and Y axis shows industry funding of HIT (units: million dollars).

  6. The departments include astronautics, civil engineering, electronics and information engineering, municipal and environmental engineering, mechatronics engineering, architecture, material science and engineering, transportation science and technology, energy science and engineering, computer science and technology, electrical engineering and automation, chemistry and chemical engineering.

  7. The database is not open to the public, but one of the author is the president of the school of science and industrial technology of HIT. So we can get access to this unique official database.

  8. The proportion of industry funding out of researchers’ total funding might not be a perfect proxy for the UIC intensity. Except funding university-industry collaboration also has other channels of interaction, but those interactions are highly correlated with obtaining direct funding from industry (Banal-Estañol et al. 2015; Meissner 2010).

  9. The coauthor can be from the university, the industry or other organizations.

  10. Actually, we calculated LR test and Vuong test to confirm the model we selected was adequate. The test results will be listed and explained in next section.

  11. In China, the share of educational expenditure in GDP was less than 4% before 2012, and was a little higher than 4% in 2012–2014, which was far below the developing country, 9%.

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Zhang, B., Wang, X. Empirical study on influence of university-industry collaboration on research performance and moderating effect of social capital: evidence from engineering academics in China. Scientometrics 113, 257–277 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2464-1

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