Firms’ innovation and university cooperation. New evidence from a survey of Italian firms

Abstract In this article, we investigate whether the cooperation with universities may stimulate the innovative performance of Italian firms. We use a dataset merging information from two different surveys carried out by the Bank of Italy between 2007 and 2010. We derive our results using a two-stage procedure with the aim of ruling out spurious correlations due to the existence of omitted variables. Results show that the cooperation with universities does not affect the likelihood of firms introducing technological innovations. However, when we distinguish between pure technological innovation outcomes (only new products and/or productive processes) and joint innovation outcomes, which involve both organizational and technological changes, we find that only the latter is positively stimulated by the cooperation with universities. These findings are promising since, according to the innovation management literature, joint innovation activities are more successful in transferring new ideas and new business opportunities into market success.