Assessing The Efficiency Of University Science Parks:fron The Perspective Of Value-Added Contribution

As an important mechanism to stimulate knowledge from universities to firms, University Science Parks (USPs) provide a vital resource network for the survival of new venture, wealth creation and job generation. In this paper, we investigate the effi-ciency of USPs from the perspective of value-added contribution to analyze how to strengthen the rational allocation of resources and the skill of management of USPs under continuous extension scale and how to promote the value-added contribution of USPs, and we also expect to provide a new avenue for further research of USPs.Foreign scholars focus on the value-added contribution of USPs to tenant, such as enhancement of the founding and the high growth of tenants, improvement of the transfer of knowledge to firms and encouragement of economic development in de-prived and depressed localities, while in contrast, Chinese scholars focus on the effi-ciency of USPs, they often build an evaluation model to assess the efficiency of USPs and rely on measurement method to evaluate the efficiency. However, it is difficult to assess the impact and effectiveness of USPs because of the diversity of objectives and expectations of stakeholders (Monck et al.,1988) and the difficulties of measuring the relevant performance criteria (Siegel et al.,2003a).Based on the data of65USPs in China, we apply an evaluation model to assess the efficiency of USPs. Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis, this study measures the efficiency of survival, wealth creation and job generation of USPs. The results suggest that the overall efficiency of USPs is not high, mainly because of the lack of fund, the unreasonable usage of infrastructure, the shortage of service intermediaries and the low the level of management.Moreover, built upon the three dimensions of efficiency, this article conducts Cluster Analysis on the efficiency to categorize Chinese USPs into four typologies: multi-superior, incubation orientation, wealth orientation and job orientation. The re-sults also indicate the increase of survival rate relies on the increase of incubation fund, and the increase of wealth creation and job generation depends on the improve-ment of physical infrastructure; and the paper distinguishes the differences and the directions of promoting the value-added contribution of four types USPs.With the comparison of National Science Park of Shenzhen Virtual University and National Southwest Jiaotong University Science Park, we hope to find the evolu- tionary of USPs and the causes that influence the efficiency. The results show that the USPs in China experience from the first generation to the second generation, from structural holes jockeys to social capital catalysts. The second generation Science Parks emphasize on building virtual network to acquire social capital, which improve the efficiency of its incubation.