Relationship Dynamics between University Research Centers and Industrial Firms: Their Impact on Technology Transfer Activities

In this study we focus on relationship-oriented factors such as trust, geographic proximity, communication, and university policies for intellectual property rights (IPR), patents and licenses and examine how these factors influence the technology transfer process between university research centers and their industrial partners. Data for this study were collected from 189 industrial firms working with 21 research centers affiliated with prominent research-oriented universities in the US. Our results showed that trust, geographic proximity, and flexible university policies for IPR, patents, and licenses were strongly associated with greater technology transfer activities. The implications for both researchers and practitioners are discussed. INTRODUCTION The competitive landscape today is characterized by the simultaneous effect of rapid-fire technological change, shorter product life-cycles, the continual entrance of new players, and constantly evolving customer needs. To combat these multiple forces, firms must have access to a wellspring of new competitive technologies (Werther, Berman & Vasconcellos, 1994) accessible through intra or inter-organizational initiatives or through a combination of both (Jarillo, 1989, Kanter, 1989). In dynamic environments, inter-organizational initiatives are powerful because they enable organizations to share risks, build on jointly shared capabilities, and create synergies for better competitiveness (CyrMichel Re, 1999). We are interested in inter-organizational initiatives between industrial firms and universities (I/U relationships) since they meld academic research interests to practitioner applications (Jankowski, 1999). Specifically, our focus is on I/U relationships that facilitate technology transfer, i.e., activities surrounding the continued acquisition, transfer, and assimilation of new technologies. Here, we extend previous work on relationship dynamics between collaborating partners and investigate the impact of these dynamics on the technology transfer process. We contend that the firm's trust of its university partner is the cornerstone of developing a stable relationship (Das &