Research on the Relationship between University-industry Collaboration Networks and Innovation Performance at Firm Level based on Complex Network Analysis

In this paper, we firstly investigate multiplicative interaction between clustering and reach as well as their effect on members’ knowledge creation and patent value based on complex network analysis in Nanobio pharmaceuticals, an emerging and rapidly evolving field. This study broadens this to university-industry collaboration networks in the emerging interdisciplinary field at firm- level. Furthermore, we build network to detect the impact of small world properties as well as the size of largest component on patent value of innovation performance at firm level. We do find that small-world structure has parabolical effect on patent value of innovation at firm-level. We add new evidence to the literature on this topic with an empirical investigation for the university-industry patent collaboration in nanobio pharmaceutical field. Given that the high skew of patent value among patents, we use weighted patent value as a measure of the invention’s innovation performance rather than simple patent counts. The findings broaden and enrich the existing literature and can contribute to policy makers and relevant managers when making decisions for university and firm locality as well as the choices of the collaborators. Acknowledgements: This study is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NO. 70832001)