The Dynamic Duality Impact Of UIC To The Firm Technological Capability Structure

As the university-industry collaboration(UIC) became the main way of enterprises to promote technology innovation, how do enterprises select different kinds of UIC modes based on their own technical capacity is becoming more and more important, so that enterprises can make UIC long term strategic plans, improve the efficiency of utilizing social technical knowledge resource, and enhance the industry’s technical capacity and enterprises’ comprehensive technical strength. At present, steming from chasing short term benefit, Chinese enterprises, universities and research institutes all tend to acquire mature proprietary technology and select UIC modes blindly in the guide of performance-aimed program. These phenomena cause some problems, for example, the waste of technical knowledge resource, limitation on enterprises’ innovative capacity, unbalance of industry’s technical structure and ignore of exploring high technology, and all of these arose the attention from academy and enterprises. However, the existed research are restricted to describe the enterprises’ technical capacity(ETC) simply, which are lack of analysis on interaction between UIC and ETC, as well as short of systematically and intensively empirical study.In order to develop effective UIC strategies for enterprises, to realize the goal of matching UIC and ETC, this thesis focus on the core question of how enterprises conduct UIC based on own technical capacity. We deconstruct the dimension and measurement of the ETC structure, and build the interaction and evolution models between UIC and ETC structure using literature research and single case study method. The following studies will further divide into three sub-problems:(1) How do UIC influence ETC structure?(2) How do enterprises select different kinds of UIC modes based on own ETC structure?(3) What is the evolution way of interaction between UIC and ETC structure? And how do UIC modes and technology types change under different development stages of enterprise? And how do enterprises make UIC strategic plans? We design the following two sub-studies to answer these questions progressively.THE STUDY 1 contraposes Proposition one proposed by case studies. On the basis of theory analysis and literature review, and under the knowledge-based view, we propose two hypothesises that the influence of complementary UIC mode on the span of ETC structure, and the influence of supplementary UIC mode on the depth of ETC structure. We use multiple linear regression to study the interaction between UIC and ETC structure, and then further test the above hypothesises.THE STUDY 2 contraposes Proposition two proposed by case studies. On the basis of theory analysis and literature review, we standardize the data of span and depth of ETC structure, complementary UIC strength and supplementary UIC strength from 1090 samples in distribution over time. Then we get a scatterplot which shows the evolution relationship of UIC and ETC structure, to fitting the scatter, an interaction and evolution relationship function between UIC and ETC will be deduced. Comparing the trends of fitting function with multiple linear regression, we can further verify the interaction and evolution relationship between UIC and ETC.Drawing on the above research, some conclusions, which also constitute the contributions of this paper, can be presented as follows:(1) From the perspective of technology interaction, enterprises conduct the supplementary UIC mode to absorb homogeneous knowledge, so that they can improve the professional level of owned knowledge niches. And enterprise conduct complementary UIC mode to absorb heterogeneous knowledge and increase types of technology niches, in order to rich the technical capability structure and product types. Considering the scale and capital of a company, enterprises cannot take the risk of conducting supplementary and complementary UIC at the same time. Under different situations, enterprises can adjust the emphasis of introducing this two kinds of knowledge services based on the need of themselves and market, so that they improve own technical capability. In detail, on one hand, an enterprise which is under early growth or just absorb emerging technology should put the emphasis of introducing technology on supplementary UIC. On the other hand, an enterprise which is mature and expanding can put the emphasis of introducing technology on complementary UIC.(2) From the long term and integrally dynamic point of view, at diverse development stage of an enterprise, different UIC modes can be preferred. At the initial stage, enterprises in UIC with weak production and R&D capability, depend on the UIC to gain innovation, and the key mode of UIC is supplementary. At the mid-term of UIC, as the ability of learning and imitating of an enterprise improved dramatically, UIC should focuses on exploring applied common technology, and enterprises should conduct complementary UIC mode gradually. Meanwhile, additional and certain extent supplementary UIC is also needed for helping absorb and digest newly introduced technical resource. At the mature stage, the self-innovative ability of enterprise has improved, and UIC becomes the auxiliary tool of technical innovation in enterprise. It leads to the cooperation among UIC focuses on basic technology exploration and introducing complementary technology. In summary, from initial stage to mature stage, the emphasis of UIC changes as follows: supplementary mode—complementary & supplementary modes—complementary mode. And the enterprises’ technical ability changes as follows: technology acquisition ability—technology absorption and digestion ability—self-innovative ability. As well as the technical collaboration types change as follows: proprietary technology—applied common technology—applied basic technology.