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University-industry R&D cooperation in Brazil: a sectoral approach

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Abstract

This paper assesses determinants of university-industry R&D cooperation at the sectoral level. Our goal was to discuss the relevance of traditional hypotheses on university-industry linkages to developing countries in light of evidence from Brazil’s Innovation Survey to provide empirical support on the basis of two groups of independent variables: internal characteristics of firms (size, intramural R&D, extramural R&D, product innovativeness, process innovativeness), and external characteristics of markets and policies (economic risk, innovation cost, government funding). We find that for sectors other than the most cooperation-intensive outliers, the main determinants of university-industry collaboration are size, extramural R&D, and product innovativeness. Extramural R&D appears as the dominant determinant and seems to occur at the expense of intramural R&D, suggesting a substitution effect. When the outliers are included in the mix, the main predictors are size, intramural R&D and government funding, providing support to the absorptive capacity argument.

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Notes

  1. Actually, this aggregation is not quite problematic for our study, since the national research infrastructure has played a key role in the provision of trials services for firms in Brazil (De Negri and Squeff 2016).

  2. This information is not present in PINTEC 2011, so we used the data from the Brazilian Annual Industrial Survey (PIA) to obtain the number of full time employees in the firms of each sector in 2011.

  3. Since the values of this indicator were too high in comparison to the others, we operated for them a logarithmic transformation in order to have all the indicators in a similar scale.

  4. We ran tests for all the main regression assumptions (validity, additivity, linearity, independence, homoscedasticity, normality and noncollinearity). For space-saving reasons, we are not going to present the test results. For details on regression assumption and diagnostics, see Gelman and Hill (2007).

  5. Median regression models are a kind of Quantile Regression, first introduced by Koenker and Bassett (1978), using the 50th percentile (median) for the estimation.

  6. Rapini et al. (2009) found similar results, indicating that a fair amount of non-R&D-performing Brazilian firms considers universities and research institutes as an important source of information, which suggests a substitutive role of these organizations vis a vis firms’ internal research activities.

  7. This trade-off relationship between IntraInt and ExtraInt in the university-industry linkages is consistent with the recent findings of Silva Jr. (2016) on the R&D cooperation using the laboratory infrastructure in Brazil.

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Acknowledgements

Diego Silva acknowledges the support of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) through a Ph.D. scholarship and also the Fulbright Foundation and CAPES grant for a visiting scholar position at the Center for International Science and Technology Policy (CISTP) at the George Washington University, USA. He acknowledges as well the infrastructural support of the CISTP and the Department of Science and Technology Policy at University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. Nick Vonortas acknowledges the infrastructural support of the CISTP and also the support of FAPESP through the São Paulo Excellence Chair in technology and innovation policy at Unicamp, Brazil. And, he acknowledges support from the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics within the framework of the subsidy to the HSE by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’. None of these organizations are responsible for the contents of this paper. Remaining mistakes and misconceptions are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Science and Technology Policy, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

    Diego R. de Moraes Silva & André T. Furtado

  2. Center for International Science and Technology Policy and Department of Economics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Nicholas S. Vonortas

  3. São Paulo Excellence Chair, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

    Nicholas S. Vonortas

  4. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation

    Nicholas S. Vonortas

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  1. Diego R. de Moraes Silva
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  2. André T. Furtado
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  3. Nicholas S. Vonortas
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Correspondence to Diego R. de Moraes Silva.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Sectors of economic activity
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Table 6 Indicators (%)
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de Moraes Silva, D.R., Furtado, A.T. & Vonortas, N.S. University-industry R&D cooperation in Brazil: a sectoral approach. J Technol Transf 43, 285–315 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-017-9566-z

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