An empirical study of university–industry R&D collaboration in China: Implications for technology in society

• Research and Development (R&D).
• University -Industry Collaboration.
• Impact of collaboration on Innovation.
• Technology in society.

This research investigates the growing phenomenon of university–industry (U–I) collaboration in high-tech strategic projects in China. After significant changes in the trading policies of 1978, China has gained heightened attention in technology and innovation. To achieve the stated strategic national goals, Research and Development (R&D) collaboration is essential. Organizations preferred to collaborate in order to share the burden of R&D costs and efforts. The academic outputs (research publications) of Chinese academic institutions and technology patenting ratio are increasing daily in China. These increasing numbers signal the importance of R&D. High-tech industries are inclined to share projects with universities. Foreign enterprises, state supported enterprises and local industry have played key roles to strengthening university–industry relationships.This study explores the U–I collaboration patterns among Chinese universities and high-tech industry on the basis of quantitative analysis using a research instrument. This empirical study depicts a cross-sectional analysis of two subsets of the U–I population. The U–I relationship was demonstrated in terms of the determinants of R&D collaboration and the outcome of alliances. The results show that U–I collaboration is established and encouraged due to factors such as: R&D tendency, R&D risks, R&D promotion factors such as state incentives. Innovative incentives, technological gains and sharing R&D cost and efforts to optimize the R&D budgets are principal outputs of these coalitions. Practitioners and researchers also agree that strategically, U–I collaboration is an obligatory practice for China to achieve the goals of becoming a world innovation center. Considering and evaluating the R&D collaborative determinants based on their own experiences, the majority of the respondents suggested that U–I collaboration should be enhanced in or at least sustained at current levels in the future in order to continue this pace of development.