On the Factors that Affect the Proneness of University- Industry Cooperation: A System Engineering Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of organizational features and context variables on the proneness of University-Industry cooperation (UIC) in the R&D and engineering process. Using survey data of manufacturing enterprises in Guangdong province of China, the paper shows that the probability of cooperation with university significantly depends on various organizational factors including firm size and enterprise absorptive capacity. In addition, the actually pay tax the collection of business-to-market and technical information, and market position are also important driving factors to the engineering research cooperation between enterprises and universities, but their influences vary with the type of product innovation and process innovation.