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8872In today’s knowledge-driven economy era, when the open innovation has become the main paradigm, " Industry-University-Research Institute”（IUR）collaborations are expected to promote the production, transfer and application of science and technology（S&T）knowledge. Enhancing IUR collaborations has been deemed as a key strategy and approach for improving China’s innovative capability in several important released government documents. In this context, academic teams, as an important organization creating knowledge in the national innovation systems, are encouraged to jump into IUR collaborations to improve the innovation performance of enterprises and promote economic development. This raises an interesting and important topic: what impact do IUR collaborations have on the academic performance of academic teams? However, this issue is still subject to considerable controversy in academia. Moreover, compared to abundant studies that routinely investigate how the knowledge transfers from academic institutions to industry sectors and its effects on firms’ innovation performance, few studies have devoted attentions on what influence mechanisms and pathways between IUR collaborations and the academic performance of academic teams and thus leave a research gap.In this study, we take the academic teams that participate in IUR collaborations as the research sample, and adopt some related theories and previous studies, as well as practical IUR collaboration cases in China, as the theoretical and practical basis to sort out the logical relationships among IUR collaborations, research and development（R&D）behavior, and the academic performance of academic teams, which contributes to developing hypotheses and constructing a theoretical model. Furthermore, the questionnaire scale is developed to capture the data of IUR collaborations, R&D behavior and the academic performance of academic teams. After that, the multiple hierarchical regression analysis is employed to verify the hypotheses and the theoretical model.In this manner, the influence mechanism that IUR collaborations exert on the academic performance of academic teams is revealed, and we find that there are two influence paths that IUR collaborations affect the academic performance of academic teams, namely, IUR collaborations-basic research behavior-academic performance and IUR collaborations-technological development behavior-academic performance. More specifically, one path: IUR collaborations have an inverted U-shaped effect on the basic research behavior, and then the basic research behavior further has a linear and positive effect on the academic performance of academic teams, therefore resulting in an inverted U-shaped relationship between IUR collaborations and the academic performance of academic teams; the other path: IUR collaborations have a linear and positive effect on the technological development behavior, and then the technological development behavior has an inverted U-shaped effect on the academic performance of academic teams, therefore leading to an inverted U-shaped relationship between IUR collaborations and the academic performance of academic teams.This paper contributes to extant literature in the following ways: First, in sharp contrast to current studies that conventionally implement a brief analysis of the relationships between IUR collaborations-organizational performance, our study attempts to open the " black box” on the influence path between IUR collaborations and the academic performance of academic teams by making a deeper investigation on the influencing relationships among IUR collaborations, R&D behavior and academic performance. Thus, our study fills in the research gap in existing literature that rarely devotes to this research topic so far. Second, compared with current studies that mainly focus on how corporations’ performance is influenced by their being involved in IUR collaborations, this paper attempts to reveal what impact that IUR collaborations exert on the academic performance of academic organizations. Thus, our study enriches the empirical studies on IUR collaborations from the perspective of academic organizations rather than economic organizations. Third, this study explores how IUR collaborations affect the academic performance of academic teams and gets some important research findings, which may present some practical inspirations for academic teams to effectively manage the collaborative relationships with industries for achieving the best for the academic performance.
/ Journals / Foreign Economics & Management
Foreign Economics & Management
LiZengquan, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YinHuifang HeXiaogang LiuJianguo, Vice Editor-in-Chief
A Study on the Influence Path between IUR Collaborations and the Academic Performance of Academic Teams
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 40, Issue 12, pp. 71 - 83 (2018) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2018.12.005
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Cite this article
Zhang Yi, Long Minglian, Zhu Guilong. A Study on the Influence Path between IUR Collaborations and the Academic Performance of Academic Teams[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2018, 40(12): 71-83.
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