Driving factors of external funding and funding effects on academic innovation performance in university–industry–government linkages

This study focuses on analyzing the driving factors of government and industry funding and the effects of such funding on academic innovation performance in the Taiwan’s university–industry–government (UIG) collaboration system. This research defines the relationships of the triple helix in the UIG collaboration system as a complex intertwined combination that covers demography, financial support, and innovation performance. These relationships are simultaneously modeled by a multivariate technique, structural equation modeling, to investigate the causal-effect relationship among the antecedent factors on the subsequent ones. This model will enable us to investigate three questions: (1) Is government funding or industry funding tied to university demography, to university innovation performance, or to both? (2) Does government funding lead industry funding? (3) Is government funding or industry funding conducive to more university innovation performance? In addition to verifying the model against all participating universities in the UIG collaboration, we also categorize them into two tiers in terms of whether or not universities have been selected for the incentive programs of UIG collaboration so as to explore groups’ differences.