A Study of the Factors Influencing Industry-Academia Collaboration Activities in Private Universities

It is imperative that industry-academia collaboration activities are implemented successfully to achieve open innovation, and such awareness has grown in recent years. Private companies and universities are organizations with very different purposes and characteristics; it is therefore generally difficult for them to cooperate with each other. We focused on industry-academia collaboration activities and factors influencing them in private universities. This study aims to reveal which factors influence industry-academia collaboration activities in private universities and to what extent. Based on the case of Japanese private universities, the data on industry-academia collaboration activities and candidates for influencing factors of 136 private universities, including 62 private universities with engineering faculties, were collected, and individual and comprehensive relationships were analyzed. As a result, the positive factors influencing the 136 universities and 62 universities were identified as follows: number of graduate students, and number of research papers or amount for grants-in-aid for scientific research. On the other hand, the negative factor influencing the 62 universities was number of undergraduate students. Consequently, it is necessary to expand graduate schools, reinforce basic research, and increase the number of researchers corresponding to the number of undergraduate students. We hope these results are useful for considering university management and for planning policy measures.