Determinants of Industry-Academy Linkages and Their Impacts on Firm Performance: The Case of Korea as a Late-comer in Knowledge Industrialization

This paper utilizes the Korea Innovation Survey data to find out the determinants of industry-university and industry-GRI (IUG) cooperation and its impact on firm performance. We find first that among determinants of IUG cooperation, traditional firm characteristics variables of sizes and R&D intensity are not significant at all, while the participation at the national R&D project turns out be most significant and robust in both cooperation modes. This is in quite contrast to the results from the cases of European countries, and reflects importantly the heavy weight of government policies in promoting the IUG cooperation in late-comer economies. Second, regarding the impacts of the IUG cooperation, we strikingly find no significant impact on the innovation probability of firms when we control the possible endogeneity such that already innovative firms might participate more at such cooperation modes. This implies that the IUG cooperation cannot guarantee a firm success in technological innovation; rather, it may have an influence on the selection or direction of the firm’s research projects. When we limit the analysis to the innovative firms, we do find positive impacts of the IUG cooperation on patents generated from new product innovation but no impacts in terms of sales increase or labor productivity. These results seem to reflect the still transitional nature of the NIS and knowledge industrialization.