Exploring the effect of political borders on university-industry collaborative research performance: Evidence from China’s Guangdong province

Publication date: Available online 19 February 2019Source: TechnovationAuthor(s): Guanghua Chen, Guoliang Yang, Feng He, Kaihua ChenAbstractThis paper investigates how political borders affect university-industry (U-I) collaborative research performance. It is hypothesised that cross- and within-regional political borders have an inhibitory effect on cross-border U-I collaborative research performance. The empirical research considers political borders and geographic distance to disentangle the border effect from the spatial distance effect based on a novel dataset comprising 681 U-I collaborative research projects in China’s Guangdong province. The results confirm the hypothesis that within-regional political border has a negative impact on U-I collaborative research performance, while an inhibitory effect of cross-regional political border was not observed. The results are robust for alternative dependent variables and different regression methods. Theoretical contributions and practical implications for cross-border U-I collaborative research management and policies are discussed.

Source: Technovation - February 19, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research