Examining the interaction between university knowledge and firms’ innovation objectives

Abstract

To deal with uncertainties, firms have adopted a ‘parallel path’ strategy in which they apply research and development outcomes to a variety of objectives in innovation activities. Considering another factor of successful innovation, searching for ideas from wider technological domains can increase the probability of success. However, the number of possible combinations of a wider variety of knowledge sources and a greater number of objectives within innovation activity expands dramatically. This article focuses on the interaction between the utilization of university knowledge and objective diversification and analyses the relationship between that interaction and the technological outcome. The results show that the effect of interaction between the utilization of university-generated knowledge in innovation activities and the diversification of objectives has an inverse U-shaped relationship in product innovation, and the utilization of university knowledge leads to a better outcome when the firm has a moderate number of objectives, rather than few or many.