Analysing knowledge transfer channels between universities and industry: To what degree do sectors also matter?

There is a wide variety of channels through which knowledge and technology is being transferred between universities and industry. This paper aims to explain the relative importance of these different channels in different contexts. For this purpose, responses from two questionnaires were analysed, addressing Dutch industrial and university researchers, respectively. A reassuring result is that the perceived importance of the 23 distinct transfer channels we distinguished hardly differs between industry and university: we did not observe a major mismatch. Overall, our results suggest that the industrial activities of firms do not significantly explain differences in importance of a wide variety of channels…