Universities as Research Partners in Publicly Supported Entrepreneurial Firms

Partnerships between universities and industrial firms can play a key role in enhancing competitiveness because they provide a conduit for the spillover of knowledge from the academic organization where knowledge is created to the firm where it is transformed into innovative activity. We set forth in this paper a model of industry/university participation, and we test the model empirically using research project data on entrepreneurial firms that were funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. We find that larger firms are more likely to be involved in a research partnership with a university, in general, as are firms with founders who have an academic background. We find the latter result holds across disaggregated types of university partnerships, as well. We find no empirical evidence that the size of the SBIR award influences the likelihood of a research partnership.