A Study On The Mechanism Of The Effect Of University-Industry Collaboration To The Core Competence Of Academic Teams In Universities

For a long time, the understanding of university-industry collaboration in academic circle, universities, and education authorities has never been changed. They mostly consider that university-industry collaboration is an important carrier of function of the university's serving society, and that its funding is an important complement to university research funding, and so on. These views of opinion regard university-industry collaboration as a unilateral export from university to society. They don't recognize the university-industry collaboration activities from the perspectives of high level university construction and first-class academic team development. Especially, it is reflected in the university's performance evaluation system such as assessment indicators mainly emphasizing on“academic papers”and“vertical projects”, which makes unequal evaluation on between university-industry projects and vertical projects. The guidance of this evaluation leads to the fact that the excellent academic resources of universities were not devoted to the actual requirements of industries. As early as 2005, the former Minister of Education Zhou Ji, pointed it out clearly that“university-industry collaboration is the sole way for the development of high level university and first-class university”. Therefore, from the point of the view of university-industry collaboration, the mechanism of the effect of the university-industry collaboration to the academic team core competence in universities is explored in this dissertation, which can provide the universities with some theoretical implication for optimizing academic team building. This is also the purpose and significance of this study.Based on case studies, related theories and use for reference of firm core competence viewpoint, this dissertation investigates the components of university academic team's core competence theoretically, and restores the dynamic evolutionary path of university academic team's core competence logically. On this basis, this study builds a conceptual model on how university-industry collaboration impacting on the formation of the academic team's core competence. It is useful to explain the core research issues of this dissertation, namely, how academic team can be built effectively through the resources flowing from university-industry collaboration, and how its research performance can be ultimately improved.The dissertation proposes that the development locus of the university academic team's core competence is a combining process of the continuity accumulation of core competence's various elements and overall capacity intermittent transitions. The intermittent transitions of the academic team's core competence is the result of the continuity accumulation of core competence's various elements, meanwhile the elements'accumulation is the prerequisite of the transitions. Based on resource integration theory, this dissertation further analyses the dynamic growth path of the academic team core competence and proposes a“pyramid”model on the growth process and mechanism of the academic team core competence. The growth process of the academic team core competence can be summarized as“insight into the technical requirements and academic frontiers, identification and acquisition of technology and knowledge resources, to assimilate, activate and integrate into new resources, and to create value through those integrated resources”. There are four different corresponding capabilities, namely,“resources judgment capacity, resources identification and acquisition capacity, resources configuration capacity, and resources exploitation capacity”. First of all, the academic team's own position should be determined between reality needs and discipline development, in order to better understand the required resources for team development. Secondly, the technology and knowledge resource matching with team development should be identified and acquired, in order to achieve the accumulation of a variety of innovative resources for team development. Thirdly, new and team-specific resources, especially tacit knowledge, should be formed through organizational learning, activation and effective integration of the team's internal and external technology and knowledge resources. Finally, the new and integrated resources should be used to create value. The growth mechanism of the academic team's core competence can be summarized as“to make the academic team win the competition in the priority through a series of factors which are resources integration, especially, the implementation of the internal and external technology and knowledge resources integration, the ability to match the industry needs and academic frontier in the growing process of team core competence, the ability to monitor technology and knowledge, and the organizational learning ability and academic creativity of the team.”The university-industry collaboration impacts on team building by providing material resources and knowledge resource, which helps teams to break through the bottleneck of the resources of scientific research. Eventually, the academic teams create or accumulate new knowledge by integrating and sharing complementary knowledge to generate knowledge coordination effect. Various resources will impact two levels of both the team's academic leaders and the whole team, respectively, after they flow into the academic team system. They will influence the team's core competence building via promoting the ability of academic leaders, improving the formalization of the team, developing team learning ability and creating team culture, and so on.The empirical study of this dissertation is based on 98 samples (academic teams) collected from five universities in Guangdong Province. The results show that the scope (scale) and the depth (level) of university-industry collaboration are positively related to both the academic team building and the core competence improvement, namely, the collaboration influences the team core competence through the effect of the team building. However, the cooperation depth has more effects on team core competence building than cooperation scope does. The cooperation scope has a positive impact on both team formalization and learning ability, but compared with cooperation depth, it has more prominent performance on team formalization. Cooperation depth has positive impacts on team formalization, team culture, and team learning ability. Compared with cooperation scope, however, it has more effects on team learning ability. Team formalization, team culture and team learning ability all have significant impacts on the relationship between university-industry collaboration and team core competence building. Team formalization and team learning ability have partial mediating effects on the relationship. Team culture has complete mediating effects on the relationship between cooperation depth and serving society ability, but it doesn't have mediating effects on the relationship between cooperation scope and team core competence building. Team research preference has an impact on the relationship between university-industry collaboration and academic team building. When team research preference fits the project direction, it will benefit the team building. Team members'complementarities have an impact on the relationship between university-industry collaboration and academic team building. The perfect complementarities among team members can enlarge the impact of university-industry collaboration on academic team.