| A new round of technological revolution and industrial change is reshaping the global innovation map and restructuring the global economic landscape.All countries have formulated strategies for innovation-driven development,seeking to seize this new round of innovation opportunities to accelerate breakthroughs in core technologies.As a vital source of new theories,new products,and new technologies,universities bear crucial responsibilities in the free exploration of scientific frontiers and major national science and technology strategies.General Secretary Xi Jinping put forward new missions and new requirements for universities in the report of the19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,explicitly pointing out to accelerate the construction of first-class universities and disciplines,and deepening the integration of industry and education.Although universities are a pivotal driving force for the leapfrog development and core competitiveness enhancement of local pillar industries as well as an essential key component in the industrial technology innovation chain,their scientific research achievements need to exploit enterprises as carriers to serve major national strategic needs and contribute to regional economic development.In China,there has been a serious disconnection between universities(the upstream of the knowledge dissemination chain)and enterprises(the downstream of the knowledge dissemination chain)for a long time(Sun,2022),which has led to the obvious deficiency of Chinese universities in technology transfer and universityindustry cooperation.On one strand,the number of patent applications and licenses of Chinese universities has been surging at a high rate for a long time,but it shows the phenomenon of low patent transformation(Yi and Long,2021).How to turn the scientific and technological achievements of universities into social productivity has become an important issue at present.On the other strand,due to the institutional problem,the innovation system adopted by China is modeled on the former Soviet Union,which is characterized by separating enterprises,universities,and public research institutions from each other(Motohashi,2013).The long-term separation between universities and enterprises makes it difficult for researchers to access market needs.Although universities have apparent advantages in basic research and research on frontier issues,the separation of scientific research and market from each other makes it difficult for universities to participate in university-industry cooperation.How to break the institutional barriers and deepening the collaboration between universities and enterprises is also a crucial issue that needs to be resolved.Meanwhile,the state vigorously advocates the establishment of enterprise-oriented,market-oriented,and deep integration of university-industry research;it puts forward new requirements for university knowledge innovation,especially innovation quality.Therefore,it is worth paying attention to whether actively promoting university knowledge commercialization may help improve university innovation quality to match the development needs of society.Furthermore,whether university knowledge commercialization may turn R&D personnel from basic research to applied research,which damages the basic research(Chang and Yang,2008;Power and Campbell,2011;Wang et al.,2015),is also a core topic that deserves attention.It is of great practical importance for China’s high-quality economic development to explore initiatives to effectively promote university knowledge commercialization without affecting the traditional functions of universities.To give full play to the advantages of university intelligence and scientific research achievements,as well as promote the transfer of existing scientific research achievements of universities to enterprises and enhance university-enterprise cooperation,drawing on the successful experience of foreign universities,the Chinese government began to explore the establishment of USPs in the 1980 s.University science parks(USPs)are considered to be a crucial means to promote university technology transfer and university-industry cooperation(Quintas et al.,1992;Belitski et al.,2019).The reason is that USPs are usually established by relying on universities with research strengths and provide incubation sites for hightech enterprises with high demand for university technologies,which attracts a large number of knowledge-intensive enterprises to cluster near the universities.Theoretically,the geographical proximity between universities and enterprises could facilitate the transfer of university technology to enterprises(Jaffe,1989;Feldman,1994)and the establishment of university-enterprise cooperation(Deeds et al.,2000;Torre and Gilly,2000;Agrawal and Cockburn,2003).In 2002,China’s Ministry of Education and the Department of Science and Technology recognized the first 22 national USPs.With the establishment of national USPs,a large number of high-tech enterprises moved into these parks.By 2017,the number of national USPs jointly recognized by the two departments reached 115,covering 157 universities in 31 provinces,and the number of incubated enterprises in the parks increased to 10,448.After two decades of rapid development in China,have national USPs helped Chinese universities achieve their goals of technology transfer and university-industry cooperation? If national USPs are effective,does its promotion of technology transfer and university-enterprise cooperation have a feedback or push-back effect on universities,pushing universities to improve their innovation quality to match enterprises’ technology demand? This is not only a matter of concern for policymakers,but also a critical topic for urgent academic research.In view of the above research and realistic background,this paper collects and compiles data on the characteristics of national USPs,Chinese university characteristic data,university patent transfer data,university-enterprise cooperation patent data,university patent citation and cited data,and national Baidu POI data,takes the establishment of national USPs by Chinese universities as an exogenous shock,and adopts the difference-in-difference model as well as the instrumental variable method to examine the impact of national USPs on university technology transfer,university-enterprise cooperation,and university innovation quality and the mechanisms.The specific contents and findings of the study are as follows.First,based on the patent transfer information of Chinese universities,this paper sums up the patents transferred to enterprises at the university level based on the year of patent transfer and the name of universities and constructs university patent transfer data to measure university technology transfer.Using a differencein-differences model,we test the impact of national USPs on university technology transfer and its potential mechanisms.The results show that compared to universities without national USPs,the technology transfer of universities with national USPs increases by 37.5%.The mechanism analysis shows that USPs influence university technology transfer via clustering enterprises,establishing branch parks,shortening the transfer time,and providing tax incentives.Furthermore,this paper observes that national USPs mainly promote the technology transfer of university-independent R&D patents and university-enterprise joint R&D patents.We also find that although national USPs promote the transfer of university technologies to university-run enterprises,they mainly promote the transfer of university technologies to other types of enterprises.Second,adopting the State Intellectual Property Office patent database,this paper screens out patents whose applicant fields include both the names of Chinese universities and enterprises,and counts the number of joint patent applications between universities and enterprises to measure university-enterprise cooperation.Then,we construct the frequency of university patents cited by enterprises and the frequency of enterprise patents cited by universities.Using the establishment of national USPs by universities as exogenous shocks,this paper investigates the influence of USPs on university-enterprise cooperation and potential mechanisms.Results show that the establishment of national USPs significantly increased the number of university-enterprise cooperation compared with non-national USPs universities.The mechanism analysis indicates that national USPs promote the cooperation between universities and enterprises through two main paths.First,it promotes the increase of patents between universities and enterprises by fostering cooperation partners between universities and "new entrants" as well as the increase of patent applications from "existing cooperation".Second,national USPs promote the two-way flow of knowledge between universities and enterprises,thus promoting the cooperation between universities and enterprises.Moreover,this paper also finds that universities with higher involvement of government or enterprise have more significant impacts on university-enterprise cooperation under the influence of USPs.Third,based on Chinese universities’ patent microdata,this paper queries and counts the frequency of Chinese universities’ patents being cited by other patents and uses it to measure university innovation quality.Using a difference-indifferences model,we identify the influence of national USPs on university innovation quality and the potential mechanisms.This paper finds that the establishment of national USPs spurs university innovation quality.The mechanism analysis reveals that the establishment of national USPs enhances university innovation quality through the increase in the number of participants per patent,the number of university-enterprise cooperation,and university technology transfer.Furthermore,this paper does not find that USPs impede basic research,such as academic papers,monographs,and subject declarations,while promoting university knowledge commercialization.Compared with existing studies,this paper may be innovative in terms of research perspective,research content,research data,and method.First,the innovation in research perspective and research content.This paper adds to the relevant literature on USPs and university innovation.Innovation contains two parts: idea generation and idea transformation into a commercial application(Scherer,1986).Following the classical theory of innovation economics,this paper distinguishes university innovation into two aspects: university knowledge commercialization and innovation knowledge output.Previous literature on USPs and university innovation has rarely studied the commercialization of university knowledge and innovation output in a unified framework.With the quasi-natural experiment of Chinese universities setting up national USPs,this paper comprehensively examines the impact of national USPs on university innovation from three perspectives: the transfer of university patents to enterprises,university-enterprise cooperation,and university innovation quality,respectively.Thus,the research in this paper is an addition to the studies related to USPs and university innovation.This paper is the first to examine the impact of national USPs established by Chinese universities on technology transfer and the mechanisms,which enrich the literature on USPs and university technology transfer.In previous studies,USPs usually appear as a supporting role: as one of the factors affecting technology transfer.The causal effect between USPs and university technology transfer is rarely examined,especially for developing countries.This paper identifies the causal relationship between China’s national USPs and university technology transfer.We analyze and verify the mechanisms of USPs on university technology transfer from the perspective of their incubator function,docking function,and tax incentives,respectively.Moreover,this paper explores the impact of USPs on the transfer of university-independent R&D patents and the transfer of university-enterprise joint R&D patents with the help of information on the transferor and transferee characteristics of micro patents.Furthermore,this study further examines whether national USPs facilitate transferring university technologies to university-run enterprises or other enterprises.This study answers how USPs promote technology transfer and the university technology transfer to which enterprises,which enriches the existing literature.This paper enriches the literature on the impact of USPs on universityenterprise cooperation.The extant literature using both qualitative and quantitative methods,mainly examines the differences between the cooperation between enterprises and universities inside and outside the USPs from the perspective of enterprises,but there is less research on the other side of university-enterprise cooperation;thus,little is known about whether USPs can effectively motivate universities to participate in university-enterprise cooperation.This paper takes universities as the perspective,and studies the influence of USPs on universityenterprise cooperation.By combining the microdata of university patents and patent citation data,we verify the mechanisms from promoting the establishment of university-enterprise "new cooperation pairs",enhancing the patent cooperation of "original cooperation pairs",and increasing the frequency of two-way knowledge flows between universities and enterprises.This study clarifies the microscopic channels of USPs affecting university-enterprise cooperation,and indicates the direction to stimulate universities to participate in university-industry research.This paper examines the impact of national USPs on university innovation quality,enriching the literature on USPs and university innovation.A large number of studies have confirmed that USPs are beneficial in promoting the performance of downstream firms,but less attention has been paid to whether USPs benefit universities located upstream in the knowledge dissemination chain.Using the cited data of university patents to measure innovation quality,we examine the impact of USPs on university innovation quality.Moreover,we verify that USPs affect university innovation quality mainly by promoting university-enterprise cooperation and university technology transfer.Furthermore,this paper also explores whether USPs,while contributing to the enhancement of university-applied research,have a substitute impact on basic research such as academic papers,monographs,and subject submissions.This paper confirms that universities can also benefit from the USPs platform and responds to the concerns of some scholars that USPs may shift university researchers from basic to applied research.Second,there are some innovations in the research data and identification methods.(1)This paper uses a large amount of microdata.We manually collected information on the list and characteristics of national USPs,university research information database,university patent data,citation and cited patent data,national Baidu POI data,and geographic location and latitude and longitude data of national universities,national USPs,and enterprises.(2)This paper has a larger sample size and higher data quality.Unlike previous studies that used a small amount of research data to examine the impact of USPs on university technology transfer and university-enterprise cooperation,this paper constructs university patent transfer data and university-enterprise cooperation patent data based on a sample of 1907 China’s universities with detailed information.This paper also collects and compiles the cited data of university patents to measure university innovation quality.Compared with previous studies,the sample coverage of this paper is wide,and the data quality is high.(3)This paper identifies various channels that influence university innovation.In the mechanisms of USPs influencing university technology transfer,this paper identifies the number of enterprises clustered around universities based on national Baidu POI data and by using Arc GIS.Furthermore,we construct the patent transfer time by adopting the application date and transfer date of university patents;moreover,this paper compiles the number of branch parks established by each USP and the tax incentives implemented.In the mechanisms of USPs influencing university-enterprise cooperation,we identify whether university-enterprise cooperative pairs are "new cooperative pairs" for the first time based on the applicant information in the university-enterprise cooperative patent data,and counts "original cooperative pairs" based on university-enterprise cooperative pairs.This paper also uses the data of enterprises patents cited by universities and university patents cited by enterprises to measure the intensity of knowledge flow from enterprises to universities and from universities to enterprises to examine the influence of USPs on the two-way knowledge flow between universities and enterprises.In studying the effect of USPs on university innovation quality,this paper identifies the number of different subjects per patent based on the information of university patent applicants.(4)This study effectively addresses the endogeneity problem.Previous studies related to USPs neglect considering the endogeneity issue caused by the non-random establishment of USPs by universities,making it difficult to assess the policy effects of USPs accurately.Whether universities establish USPs is determined by a series of factors,and these factors may also simultaneously affect university performance.The endogeneity problems caused by these factors often bias the econometric estimation results and can not accurately estimate the policy effects of USPs.To address this bias,we use a difference-in-differences model and draw on Kolympiris and Klein(2017)to construct an instrumental variable for the establishment of a national USP by universities using the number of national USPs belonging to neighboring provinces one year in advance. |
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