University-Industry Collaboration in the Biopharmaceuticals: The Italian Case

Abstract

We investigate the determinants of University-Industry (U-I) interactions in the biopharmaceuticals in Italy over the period 2004-2010, choosing co-publishing as a proxy of U-I partnerships. We construct a novel dataset of co-published articles, that contains measures of proximities, agglomeration, firms’ and universities’ characteristics. Following a consolidated methodology, we integrate our dataset of effective interactions with the set of all potential interactions, to estimate probabilistic models for the occurrence and the intensity of U-I interactions. Our main findings confirm and extend the predictions of the previous literature: i) geographical proximity and prior partnership increase the probability and the intensity of co-publication; ii) the proximity of a firm to other biopharmaceutical firms and universities attenuates the relevance of geographical proximity; iii) there exists complementarity between prior partnerships and geographical proximity. A novel result is that firms’ and Universities’ size; firms’ R&D and patents expenditure and the composition of the academic staff as well as quality of academic research exert a significant impact on the intensity of co-publishing.

Keywords: University-Industry collaborations, Biopharmaceutical industry, Co-publishing

JEL Classification: O310, O320, O330, R100