Within the highly complex ecosystem of industry-university collaboration in open innovation, three specific antecedents typically characterize the patterns of their interaction, i.e., motivations, barriers, and channels of knowledge transfer. However, an investigation of the extent to which these antecedents of opening up innovation impact the perceived importance of universities as an external knowledge source to the industry is still missing in the literature. Based on a research framework developed from a review of the literature, a two-stage ordinal regression, and neural network approach was performed to investigate this impact. In the first stage, the hypotheses of the proposed research framework were tested based on an ordinal regression, and those antecedents that significantly impacted the importance perception were revealed. In the second stage, an artificial neural network analysis was carried out to capture the complex relationships among the significant antecedents and the important perception of universities as an external knowledge source to the industry. On the whole, the findings of our study expand the existing open innovation literature and contribute to a more articulate view of the collaboration between industry and university in this field by providing a first perspective on which of the three antecedents has a significant impact on this perception and how such an impact can be predicted.
