Abstract:

The available literature stresses the contributions of universities to innovation and competitiveness through a widespread range of activities, including among others the creation of new firms. When involving academic entrepreneurship, these new firms are called academic or university spin-offs [1][2]. University spin-offs (henceforth, USOs) are new firms typically established by professors, researchers and Ph.D. students in order to exploit the outcomes of their research. USOs exploit knowledge created within the university to develop innovation with the final aim to achieve profit. As such, USOs play an important role in the economic development of a country.

Among the topic concerning USOs, that of University-Industry collaboration (henceforth, U-I collaboration or UIC) is attracting more and more attention by researchers, as the increasing number of contributions that investigate the topic confirms. Indeed, a search on Scopus with the keyword “University-Industry collaboration” and synonymous, returns more than 3000 results starting from 1959, with a peak of 278 papers published in 2021. UIC may occur in different ways (e.g., spinoff activities, startup creation, collaborative research, staff exchange between research centers, companies, and universities, or consulting activities [3][4]), includes different role of University (e.g., teaching, research and technology transfer [1]), and involves different actors (e.g., start ups, research centres [5]). These considerations allow us to say that UIC takes place in an open innovation (OI) perspective.

Based on these premises, this paper aims to investigate the literature on UIC, with a specific focus on the OI paradigm. To reach this objective, a bibliometric and keywords analysis of the extant literature was carried out. The review resulted in identifying some key aspects and allowed us to uncover and articulate the underlying structure of the research field on UIC and to trace its evolution over time [6], and to identify the concepts that persist over time, those that emerge with high frequency and those that, instead, have disappeared over the years [7].

References:
[1] Bigliardi, B., F. Galati, and C. Verbano 2013. “Evaluating Performance of University Spin-off Companies: Lessons from Italy". Journal of Technology Management and Innovation 8(2):178–188.
[2] Phan, P.H., and D.D. Siegel 2006. “The effectiveness of university technology transfer: Lessons learned from qualitative and quantitative research in the US and UK”. Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship 2(2): 66–144.
[3] Etzkowitz, H. 2003. “Innovation in Innovation: The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations”. Social Science Information 42(3):293–337.
[4] Bigliardi, B., Chiesi, A., Filippelli, S., & Tagliente, L. 2022. “University-Industry collaboration: results from a bibliometric and keywords analysis”. In INTED2022 Proceedings (pp. 9561-9571). IATED.
[5] Bigliardi, B., Chiesi, A., Filippelli, S., & Tagliente, L. 2022. “Success factors in University-Industry collaboration: lessons learned from a case study”. In INTED2022 Proceedings (pp. 9579-9587). IATED.
[6] Pritchard, A. 1969. “Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics”. Journal of Documentation 25(4): 348-349.
[7] Fadlalla, A., & Amani, F. 2015. “A keyword-based organizing framework for ERP intellectual contributions”. Journal of Enterprise Information Management 28(5): 637-657.

Keywords:

University-industry collaboration, open innovation, bibliometric analysis, analysis.