Abstract:

The tacit knowledge is the source of competitive advantage in today's globalized economies. It could help to produce much-needed innovation. However, neither the innovation itself guarantees the market success of the firm. The innovation has to be delivered to the market very quickly and price of the final product must be acceptably low. For this to happen, the industrial firms have been able to obtain and effectively utilize knowledge. Many recent innovation studies are pointed to the growing relevance of external sources of innovation. It is often knowledge gained from research or as a spill-over effect from the cooperation, in the most cases between industry and R&D organization or university, or among the subjects in knowledge-intensive business network. Some scholars describe this process as a nonlinear, iterative and multi-agent character of innovation processes.

These processes based on university-industry collaboration and their impact on innovation processes have been many times analysed in various countries and environments. It was found that the outcome of these cooperating processes affect the legislative environment and government policy and financial support framework, as well as the implementation of various types of public-private partnerships. There are some studies were carried out the increasing pressure of public authorities (and governments) on universities and higher education institutions to cooperate more closely with the industrial sector. In practice this has led to an increasing in number of scientists and university research funding by industrial firms, editing the public strategies of regional or national development, increasing the number of elements of hard infrastructure such as science and technology parks and organizations helping with the technology transfer.

Some studies indicate that induced public pressure of the various countries governments on their universities sparked the growth in the patents (coming from universities) and higher revenues from the patents or licenses usage. The studies confirmed this results and trend also in Czech Republic are still missing. The aims of this paper is to answer the question whether university-industry cooperation in the Czech Republic contributes to higher innovation performance of industrial firms than if these firms had not cooperated with universities. In case that the university-industry cooperation will not bring the higher level of innovation, it will be possible to talk about a high degree of inefficiency of university-industry-government partnership. The data from Eurostat CIS (Community innovation survey) will be used to reaching of paper aim.

Keywords:

University, industry, cooperation, innovation, case study, Czech Republic.