University-Industry Collaborations (UICs): A Matter of Proximity Dimensions? by UTKU ALİ RIZA ALPAYDIN Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PHILOSOPHIAE DOCTOR (PhD) PhD programme in Social Sciences UiS Business School 202 University of Stavanger NO-4036 Stavanger NORWAY www.uis.no ©202 Utku Ali Rıza Alpaydın ISBN: 978-82-7644-991-4 ISSN: 1890-1387 PhD: Thesis UiS No. 576 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank the members of my supervisor team, Rune Dahl Fitjar and Christian Richter Østergaard. Thank you to my main supervisor, Rune, for all your help and support during this PhD. I have truly appreciated your irreplaceable academic assistance through your insightful comments. You have been a source of a professional and intellectual guidance for my research. Your encouragement to follow my ideas and assistance to support me on every step in the best possible way substantially facilitated my PhD life. I am grateful for your generosity to share your experiences and for your dedication to review all the papers included in this thesis. Thank you to my co-supervisor, Christian, for your contributions on this PhD especially during my term as a visiting scholar at Aalborg University. The suggestions you provided strengthened significantly the empirical part of this thesis. The papers in this PhD have been presented at a wide range of conferences. I would like to thank the organizers, discussants and participants at the following conferences: The 12th Regional Innovation Policies (RIP) Conference, in Santiago del Compostela, Spain, in October 2017; The 16th Triple Helix Conference, in Manchester, United Kingdom, in September 2018; Norwegian Research School on Innovation (NORSI) Conference, in Oslo, Norway, in January 2019; University-Industry Interaction (UIIN) Conference, in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019; Technology Transfer Society (T2S) Annual Conference, in Toronto, Canada, in September 2019; and The 5th Geography of Innovation (GEOINNO) Conference, in Stavanger, Norway, in January 2020. I would like to thank the Centre for Innovation Research (CIR) and the Business School at the University of Stavanger. Special thanks to Ragnar Tveterås, whose additional support for the fieldwork and valuable feedback at my 50% seminar were well appreciated. Thanks are also due iii to Tom Broekel, who provided very constructive comments to this thesis at my 90% seminar. I would also like to thanks the organizers and participants of the internal seminars at CIR, which allowed rough research ideas to transform into solid academic articles. The valuable feedback from these seminars has contributed a lot in shaping the papers included in the thesis. I also thank the management and administration at UiS Business School for their help throughout these years. Thanks to all other PhD colleagues at the UiS Business School for all your contributions. This research was funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie action [grant agreement No. 722295] RUNIN (The Role of Universities in Innovation and Regional Development) Project. The financial support from the European Commission is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to express my gratitude the RUNIN project team and the RUNIN colleagues, which have meant a family to me. The guidance of the senior colleagues and the support of all early-stage researchers are well appreciated. I will always remember the wonderful memories of the training weeks spent together. RUNIN has enormously contributed for my academic development and researcher profile with an all-round approach. I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in such a great project and to be involved in such a great community of colleagues. I would especially like to thank Kristoffer Woldseth Moldekleiv, the Coordinator of the RUNIN project. You have acted like a glue that has kept RUNIN together. I am also personally grateful for all your support and patience with my never-ending questions. Your help made our lives in Stavanger much easier. Another set of special thanks goes to my RUNIN colleagues in Stavanger. Kwadwo and Saeed, thank you both for being wonderful workmates and a source of inspiration and solidarity. Finally, I would like to thank my family. Thanks to my mother, Hatice and my sister, Selay, for making me feel loved, cared and supported in iv every moment of my life even at a significant distance. My Dad, Mehmet Salih, I believe you can still see that I am working for making you feel proud even if you are not physically among us. Salih Yiğit, my curious son, thank you for being the fun part of this journey with your intriguing questions on daily life. Your energy and enthusiasm have ignited me when I felt desperate. Arven, my little sunshine, thank you for jumping on board in the course of the PhD. Your entrance to our family has made this journey much more meaningful. Last but not least, my dearest Seval, this PhD would certainly not have been possible without your encouragement, understanding and continuous support. Thanks for believing in me and accompanying me throughout the last 15 years. I am certainly in debt with you for your endless support. v vi Abstract Firms and universities interact with each other despite several barriers hindering their collaboration, such as distances in their worldviews, organizational structures and cognitive capabilities. This suggests that these distances can be bridged in some instances and proximity between the actors may help in the formation of university-industry collaborations (UICs). Proximity, being a multidimensional concept – including geographical and a variety of non-geographical dimensions such as cognitive, organizational, institutional and social – plays a bridging role between the two worlds of academia and industry and facilitates the formation of university-industry linkages. UIC, as well, represents an umbrella term that covers many different types of channels and refers to a broad range of activities as well as outputs of the interactions. Moreover, firms are driven by a variety of different motivations that influence their decision to engage in UICs, which adds to the comprehensiveness of UIC concept. This thesis, thus, examines UICs from the proximity perspective and aims to increase the understanding of proximity in UICs. It analyses the role, importance and influence of proximities with regards to UICs, which differ greatly in terms of their contents, outputs and motivations. Proximity, through its geographical and non-geographical dimensions, helps in the formation of collaborations between firms and universities. Yet, the influence and importance of different forms of proximity depend heavily on the UIC channels in question and the initial motivation of the firm to interact with universities. Additionally, while proximity dimensions influence UIC outputs generated, the collaboration process might also have an impact on changing the proximity between actors. Despite the overall acknowledgement of the multidimensional character of the proximity concept, it is generally assumed that geographical proximity is a strong facilitator of interactions between academia and vii industry. However, several UIC activities, such as co-publishing, can be geographically dispersed since the collaboration of actors over large distances is possible. In addition, multinational enterprises (MNEs) present a rather unique configuration for the analysis of the importance of geographical proximity in UICs owing to their distributed organizational structures across different geographical locations. This dissertation, hence, examines the importance of geographical proximity for MNE’s collaboration with universities. Through a case study of co- publication partnerships in the MNE-university setting, the findings demonstrate that the propensity to collaborate with regional vs. non- regional universities varies by the location of subsidiaries. While this may be caused by the differences in the influence of geographical proximity for different subunits within an MNE, it may well be due to some other factors which lead to different outcomes for the geography of UICs. This suggests a need for the inclusion of non-geographical dimensions of proximity in order to explain better the influence of proximity dimensions in UICs alongside the geographical dimension. Previous studies have seldom taken into consideration the multidimensionality of the proximity concept of and UICs. They rather limited their scope of analysis by covering a limited number of proximity dimensions and UIC channels. This implies that most of the prior studies falls short of providing a thorough analysis of proximity dimensions in UICs. Therefore, following the proximity framework suggested by Boschma (2005), this dissertation presents a novel and comprehensive model that examines the significance of different proximity dimensions across UIC processes. With a quantitative methodology applied via the econometric examination of a survey conducted with 1201 firms, the empirical results highlight the variation in the significance of proximities by UIC channels and outputs. The findings indicate that cognitive proximity and institutional proximity have greater importance for knowledge exploration UICs, while geographical proximity matters less for this type of collaborations. For UICs oriented towards knowledge viii exploitation, social proximity is more important, whereas organizational proximity matters less for advice-seeking