University-industry relations and entrepreneurship

Abstract

Formal or informal relations between academia and industry have become more frequent and visible. Asides from a quite conspicuous political motivation that has, in more recent times, consistently pushed towards more close relations between higher education institutions or public research organisations and enterprises, there are a number of several other reasons, most notably those related to knowledge creation and exploitation, that have contributed to draw the attention on collaborative or cooperative agreements between members of academe and industry. This paper attempts to systematize and synthesize the now vast literature on the subject. It focuses on the relationships between forms or modes of academia and industry cooperative channels and their implications on knowledge production and exploitation. It explores their contribution to the concept of entrepreneurship, contextualising the mechanism of creation of spin-off firms from university research, and other subtle or more hidden forms of entrepreneurial behaviour. It presents relevant statistics on the phenomena, describing the main empirical findings and their most important contributions, and highlighting the main arguments that underpin the theoretical debates.