Collaboration strategies and effects on university research: evidence from Chinese universities

Previous studies have provided inconsistent evidence pertaining to the relationship between university–industry collaboration and university performance. This study’s objective is to go beyond traditional viewpoints, which mostly confine university–industry collaboration within a separate channel, to build the relationship between university–industry collaboration overall channel characteristics and university research performance. In doing so, we define two collaboration strategies, collaboration breadth, which is the scope of different channels, and collaboration depth, which is the extent that universities deepen into different channels. Based on a comprehensive panel dataset of Chinese universities in mainland China in 2009–2013, we find that collaboration breadth and collaboration depth have a linear and curvilinear effect on academic research performance, respectively. Moreover, the interaction of collaboration breadth and depth shows a negative impact on academic research performance.