Industry-University Collaboration and Corporate Research Performance

This paper quantitatively analyzes the impact of industry-university collaboration on firms' research activities and productivity using Japanese firm data from 2001 to 2020. First, we analyze the characteristics of firms that engage in industry-university collaboration in terms of R&D input, output, and productivity. Next, based on those characteristics, we match firms that do and do not engage in industry-university collaboration using the propensity score matching method, and quantitatively examine the impact of the implementation of industry-university collaboration on productivity, research expenditures, and patents using the Difference in Differences method. As a result of comparing firms with equal research scale, productivity, and characteristics of enrolled researchers, but differing in whether or not they implement industry-university collaboration, it was confirmed that research expenditures increased after industry-university collaboration, especially in terms of applied development. In addition, a comparison of the number of patents before and after industry-university collaboration shows that there was no change in the number of patents in technological fields in which patents had already been obtained through industry-university collaboration prior to the change in policy, but there was an increasing number of patents in technological fields in which patents had not been previously obtained through industry-university collaboration.