Competitive Advantages from University Research Parks

The flow of knowledge from a university research park is not a new theme in the academic domain, but those studies that have focused on the prevalence of this phenomenon in the United States have been somewhat limited in the availability of data related to both the genesis of the park as well as to the performance of the park. The performance measures that I focus on in this paper are two: patents received and scholarly publications emanating from the research conducted by in-park firms. To place those flows of knowledge in perspective, I compare such in-park firm performance to matched pairs of off-park firms in an effort toward quantifying the impact of a firm being located in a university research park. My analysis shows that on average performance is greater among on-park firms than among off-park firms thus making a suggestive case that the environment created by a university research park confers competitive advantages in the form of new flows of knowledge.