The Mechanism Of Knowledge Capitalization In University:from The Perspective Of Collaborative Innovation

The capitalization of knowledge is a fundamental approach to surmount the value creation barrier of knowledge in university, while achieving a multi-win situation among different stakeholders. This article has comprehensively integrated theories of intellectual capital, knowledge management and collaborative innovation to implement research related to the mechanism of knowledge capitalization in university. More specifically, the author has proposed three research questions:(1) What’re the critical dimensions of knowledge capitalization performance in university? (2) How does intellectual capital of university influence its knowledge capitalization performance? (3) What’s the organization mode of knowledge capitalization in the context of collaborative innovation? This article has adopted research methods like literature review, exploratory case study, regression analysis and structural equation modeling to further exploit the research questions. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology, this paper draws the following conclusions:(1) Based on the discussion of core objective of knowledge capitalization, namely value-added of knowledge and value creation, this paper has proposed three critical dimensions of knowledge capitalization performance in university: university-industry cooperative R&D, commercialization of S&T achievements and collaborative innovation synergy. Then the dimensional construct has been verified through explanatory factor analysis.(2) This paper has explored the pathways in which the three dimensions of university’s intellectual capital affect its knowledge capitalization performance, while examining the mechanism of knowledge capitalization in university from the perspective of collaborative innovation. Based on the empirical data of 537 effective questionnaires, this paper has verified the direct positive influence of intellectual capital on knowledge capitalization performance of university. Then the mediating effect of knowledge management has been confirmed. Except that the influence of human capital on knowledge documentation is not significant, the empirical results show that all the other pathways that involve mediating variables have passed the hypothesis testing, which indicates knowledge documentation and knowledge transfer have played critical mediating roles in the mechanism of knowledge capitalization. The research model has also verified the positive effect of knowledge documentation on knowledge transfer, which manifests the step-by-step value-added mechanism of knowledge capitalization. Besides, this paper finds that the human capital and organization capital can achieve an indirect influence on knowledge capitalization performance through its positive effect on other dimensions of intellectual capital, which reveals the mechanism related to the internal construct of intellectual capital.(3) The smoothly running of knowledge capitalization calls for the collaboration among different stakeholders and the support of policy&institutional innovation. This paper holds that we should break the organizational boundaries and bring in corporations, research institutes, government, intermediary and financial agencies to establish a deeply-collaborative organization mode of knowledge capitalization in university based on the ultimate goal of knowledge value creation. Besides, we should make use of the reform of multi-level capital market system and relative laws to reinforce the knowledge capitalization practice, while achieving the 1+1+1+...+1>N nonlinear value premium of collaborative innovation.The theoretical contributions and innovation spots of this paper lie in following three perspective:(1) Establishing a theoretical framework of the mechanism of knowledge capitalization in university, breaking the boundaries of collaborative innovation, intellectual capital and knowledge management with extension of respective field; (2) Adopting empirical analysis on the value-added mechanism of knowledge capitalization compared with previous general cognition on its virtual mechanism, elaborating the value creation process based on comprehensive logic and providing reference on relative researches; (3) Exploring the collaborative innovation paradigm through university perspective rather than traditional view of corporation, enriching relative researches based on different organizations.