Technology Parks versus Science Parks: Does the university make the difference?

- The role of universities in Science and Technology Parks has been under researched.
- We evaluate their effect on firms' innovation and cooperation with universities.
- Higher involvement of a university is positively related to the number of patents.
- Higher involvement of a university is negatively related to innovation sales.
- No significant effect is found on links between tenants and universities.

Science and Technology Parks (STPs) has become fairly widespread through the world, although their effect on firms' innovation performance is still a very debated issue. A recent stream in the literature points to heterogeneity of tenants and of parks themselves being a key concept when assessing STPs effect on tenants' performance. An important source of STPs heterogeneity that has been disregarded so far is the degree of university involvement in these parks. At the extremes, there are parks that are owned and managed by universities, and parks with no formal links with a university. We use data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) for Spain and a survey of STP park managers to analyse how the degree of involvement of a university in the STP is related to innovation outputs of its tenants and their links with universities. We show that higher involvement of a university in the STP is positively related to the number of patent applications, but negatively related to tenant's innovation sales. In addition, we find no robust evidence that higher involvement of a university in the STP is positively related to the propensity for park firms to cooperate with a university or to purchase external R&D services from the university.