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

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.