R&D and innovation collaboration between universities and business : a PLS-SEM model for the Spanish Province of Huelva

In the last decade we have witnessed a growing amount of interest for developing better "exchange" between universities, research centres and technology parks and companies, governments and other institutions. The biggest aim of those projects is, on the one hand, to make sure that valuable research does not stay hidden in the ivory tower of academia, and, on the other, that there are clear indications for what kinds of solutions are needed in the market. Due to the lack of empirical research in the topic, the focus of this paper is to establish and explain which factors determine the demand for technological services and how they can contribute to the promotion of greater university-business collaboration in R&D and innovation. To achieve that goal, we applied the PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling) method in order to create a theoretical model, which was then verified through the application of the CTA (Confirmatory Tetrad Analysis) with the purpose of evaluating whether the specification of the chosen measurement model based on the theoretical rationale was supported by data. The test run was performed on 96 companies from the Spanish region of Huelva. It showed that only four of the considered factors, namely influence of the environment, market conditions, technology adoption decision and economic characteristics of the company, constituted 65.76% of the variance of the endogenous latent Demand for Technological Services. We believe that thanks to the proposed model and its adaptivity, it is possible to design relevant policies and undertakings aimed at promoting the research-business collaboration at the regional, national and international levels.