S&T Collaboration Platform for Higher Education Institutions and Industry: a Case Study of Wenzhou, China

Abstract

Collaboration between higher education institutions and industry seems to have become increasingly important for the industrialized countries. To realize the maximized profits through such collaborations, it is important to have a fruitful and healthy collaboration. S&T collaboration platform in Wenzhou, China, is a new fashioned form. This paper analyzes the collaboration relationship and explores the influence of collaboration on private SMEs. Based on a survey of 523 private SMEs and 61 higher education institutions, the results indicate that private SMEs can improve economic performance through the collaborations with higher education institutions on the platform. Furthermore, the economic performance of private SMEs is positively related with the collaborated projects. In other words, the number of the collaboration projects is one of the factors that affect the economic performance (i.e. the more collaboration, the better economic performance). The results have also revealed that SMEs that choose different collaboration models on the platform will produce different effects on the economic performances of enterprises. In addition, the major barriers to the collaboration have been analyzed from two perspectives in this study. Among all the collaboration barriers between universities and private SMEs, “Lack of efficient communication channel” and “Unreasonable transfer cost for the R&D achievements of universities” have been identified as the most important factors. Meanwhile, the performances of the five communication mechanisms (i.e. coordination mechanism, supervision mechanism, transmission mechanism, propaganda mechanism and guarantee mechanism) have also been examined with the aim of devising policies and proposing a possible solution to improve the collaboration efficiency between higher education institutions and industry.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.24.5.2591