The status of university-industry collaboration in China, EU and USA--A comparative research on co-authored publications

Abstract

The type of this paper is research. Policymakers and industry strategists in developing countries are increasingly considering initiatives that foster university-industry collaboration (UIC), such as those implemented in developed economies over the past decades. Their goal is to enhance the capabilities and efficiency of innovation systems by leveraging the roles of universities as generators and disseminators of valuable knowledge, which is still highly concentrated in the academia of these nations. In this study, UICs in China, the European Union (EU), and the United States (US) are analyzed in terms of co-authored publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). We conducted sample comparison and regression analysis of data from the CWTS Leiden Ranking and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The results show a wide gap between China and the EU/US: (1) Chinese universities are much less active in collaboration with industry in terms of both publication productivity and collaboration intensity. (2) In selecting local and foreign industrial partners, however, greater variation is found among Chinese universities than among EU and US universities. The Chinese system is almost exclusively domestically oriented and the US system is oriented both nationally and internationally, whereas the EU system internationally oriented. Thus, the EU research system is possibly more open than those of the US and China. (3) In the EU, the level of university-industry collaboration is determined by the quality of the research, but in China, large research universities with strong ties to domestic industry play central roles in national publication systems.