Abstract:

    In recent years, research cooperation between enterprises and universities and research institutions has attracted increasing attention from policy makers and academic circles, which is called Industry-University-Research (IUR) cooperation. Current studies generally agree that IUR cooperation has a significant effect on technological innovation of enterprises, but they generally ignore the effect of IUR cooperation on market performance of enterprises. Therefore, the core research problem of this paper is to analyze and investigate the effect and internal mechanism of IUR cooperation on enterprise market performance.

    This paper based on the data of listed companies in China from 2007 to 2018, measures the level of Industry-University-Research (IUR) cooperation with joint patent application, and discusses the mechanism of the impact of IUR cooperation on the market performance of enterprises from the perspective of technological innovation level and technological commercial value of enterprises, furthermore, from the perspective of the breadth and depth of IUR cooperation, this paper analyzes the heterogeneous influence of IUR cooperation model on enterprise market performance. The study had the following findings: 

    First, IUR cooperation significantly inhibited the market performance, which is measured by increase rate of business revenue and Tobin′s Q value, which indicated that IUR cooperation inhibited the development of enterprises in product market and capital market at the same time, and the empirical estimation results after adjustment lag period showed that this negative effect could last for 2-3 years. This conclusion is still robust after the adjustment of various empirical methods and the consideration of model endogenicity. 

    Second, in the investigation of internal mechanism, this paper measures the technological innovation level of enterprises by the number of application of invention patents and utility model patents, and measures the technological commercial value of enterprise by the proportion of intangible assets generated by technological innovation in the total assets of enterprises, and the study found that although the IUR cooperation can significantly improve the level of enterprise′s technological innovation, but it cannot effectively increase commercial value of technology, combined with the amount of the opportunity cost, which indicates the internal mechanism that IUR cooperation inhibiting the market performance of enterprises. 

      Third, in order to further study the heterogeneous influence of the IUR cooperation model, this paper measures the cooperation breadth index by "the number of different universities or research institutions cooperating with enterprises", and measures the cooperation depth index by "the average number of cooperation between the enterprise and each cooperation object", it is found that the breadth of IUR cooperation significantly inhibits the market performance of enterprises, while the depth of cooperation has a U-type influence on the market performance of enterprises. In other words, for a small number of enterprises with deeper cooperation, the in-depth integration of IUR cooperation will help enterprises to improve the market performance. This indicates that the blind expansion of cooperation objects and the lack of in-depth integration of IUR institutes may be an important reason for the IUR cooperation to inhibit the market performance of enterprises.

    The research of this paper shows that the current IUR cooperation of Chinese enterprises not only fails to help enterprises get further development, but also inhibits the performance of enterprises in the market, which will seriously reduce the initiative of enterprises to participate in the IUR cooperation. In addition, blind pursuit of extensive IUR cooperation and the lack of in-depth integration of IUR cooperation may be an important reason why IUR cooperation inhibits the market performance of enterprises. Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate the industrialization of IUR cooperation and optimize the cooperation mode.

Key words:  industry-university-research (IUR) cooperation, market performance, technological innovation, commercial value of technology