Which firms have cooperative R&D agreements with universities? Some empirical evidence from Belgian manufacturing

This paper presents an econometric analysis of firm and industry characteristics conducive to cooperation with universities, using Community Innovation Survey (I) data for Belgium. We find that large firms are more likely to have cooperative agreements with universities. These agreements are formed whenever risk is not an important obstacle to innovation and typically serve to share costs. Consistent with the open science paradigm, we find no evidence for the importance of the capacity to appropriate the returns from innovation for explaining cooperative agreements with universities. We argue that cooperating with universities is complementary to other innovation activities such as performing own R&D, sourcing public information and cooperative agreements with suppliers and customers. Therefore, the decision to cooperate with universities cannot be analyzed in isolation from a firm's overall innovation strategy.