Catching-up and the Role of University-Industry Collaboration in Emerging Economies: Case of Turkey

Abstract

In the last century, universities have played a significant role in stimulating technological change and innovation. The recent decades have witnessed a change in the mission of the universities, namely their social mission in disseminating knowledge and interacting more broadly with the surrounding society, in addition to conduct education and research. This dissemination and interaction is often realized in the form of successful university-industry collaborations (UICs) in the developing countries. Nevertheless, this sort of realization still lacks comprehensive view. Besides, such comprehensive view is also required to address gaps and types of barriers to economic development and some possible mechanisms which could lead to catching up on the basis of UICs. Academic studies deviate such possibility of catching up is due to the balance between barriers and resource usage among institutional actors. In order to address this gap, first, we implemented a review on literature on UICs. The review provided an overarching process framework, which are distilled from the analysis. However, as current research on this issue points to, different types of university-industry interaction with government intervention and with a strong emphasis on education programs that may have high pay-offs for developing countries. In this context, we administered the concept of UICs in the case of Turkey as a developing country by which we provide a substantial contribution by creating an integrated analysis of literature and further mitigations for research topics distilled from our analysis.