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

In this paper, we investigate whether cooperation with universities stimulates 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 findings from a two-stage procedure in order to rule out any spurious correlations resulting from omitted variables. The results show that 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 cooperation with universities. These findings are promising since, according to the innovation management literature, joint innovation activities are more successful in translating new ideas and new business opportunities into market success.