Medium and small enterprises have established external collaborative relationship in order to cope with fluctuating circumstances as the government have encouraged and supported research and development through industry-university collaboration. Howev...
Medium and small enterprises have established external collaborative relationship in order to cope with fluctuating circumstances as the government have encouraged and supported research and development through industry-university collaboration. However, the collaborative technology development has been constrained by certain unfavorable conditions, namely limited research equipment, the lack of systematical organization, ambiguous and unbalanced role definitions, and the lack of trust between the parties involved.
Prior research on the industry-university collaborative technology development investigated the pattern of the collaboration, barrier factors, and other factors affecting the collaboration performance. However, no research has explored the collaboration as a partnership. Considering the industry and universities as the key players in the collaboration, prior research has described their common interests and expenditure responsibilities. Nonetheless, in reality, individual university professors rarely conduct research in collaboration with the industry. Accordingly, it is necessary to conduct research on the expenditure responsibility and building a relationship between the industry, as the main party, and the university. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of the characteristics of the researcher, the project, and relational variables on the performance and, in turn, on the trust in the researcher. In addition, the study attempts to explore the collaborative performance through the independent variables of the characteristics of the researcher, the project, and the relation and to examine the effects of the trust in the professor/researcher on the intention for future relationship.
In order to conduct the present study the research model was constructed based on those in prior studies, and the hypotheses on the relationship among the variables were generated. The participants of the study were medium and small companies across the nation in the national industrial complexes with 200 or less employees. The companies were either being involved or had participated in a collaborative relationship with universities. Besides the companies, the same questionnaires were sent out to university professors who had participated in the collaborative technology development for a comparative study purpose. Of the total of 400 questionnaires which had been sent out, 254 questionnaires were collected, of which 245 questionnaires were used for analyses, excluding 9 questionnaires with incomplete responses. 117 questionnaires were collected from the industry group and 128 questionnaires were from the university professors.
The factor analysis was employed to test the validity and the reliability of the variables derived from prior research. To test the research model and the hypotheses SPSS WIN 10.1 was employed for frequency analyses and cross-tabulation analyses, regression analyses, ANOVA.
The findings of the present study are as follows:
First, as for the industry, the level of the expertise of the researcher variable, the degree of an effort to customization of the project characteristics variable, and relational characteristics were perceived to have a significant effect on the performance of the collaboration. However, as for the university professors, only the degree of an effort to customization of the project characteristics variable and relational characteristics had a significant effect, showing a difference from the industry group.
Second, as for the industry, the level of the expertise of the researcher variable, the degree of an effort to customization of the project characteristics variable, and relation characteristics were perceived to affect the trust through their effect on the performance of the collaboration whereas as for the university professors, the degree of an effort and an effort to maintain the relationship of the relation characteristics affected the trust through their effect on the performance.
Third, for both the industry and the professor groups perceived that the trust in the researcher significantly affected the intention for continuous relationship in the future. In particular, the industry group perceived more significant effect of the trust on the future relationship than the professor group, which suggests that as for the industry when strong trust in the research results is established, it intends to expand the collaborative relationship for future research and development.
In conclusion, the findings of the study that the industry perceived the expertise of the researcher as a significant factor and that the trust in the researcher was established through the performance imply that the performance should be preceeded by the trust in the industry-university collaborative relations.