Have Chinese universities embraced their third mission? New insight from a business perspective

Have Chinese universities, after enormous investment over the past decade, embraced the university’s third mission—contributing to industrial and technological progress? The literature has not sufficiently addressed this question. This study intends to advance understanding of this issue by empirically addressing this question from a business perspective in a bold and unconventional way. Unlike prior studies that simply used contingent and institutional factors to describe the link between Chinese universities and industrial firms by measuring such aspects as patent licensing, co-patenting, and co-authoring, our work goes further and applies longitudinal analysis to examine the ways firms access university-level knowledge and the impact of such knowledge on firm innovation outputs. We propose that if Chinese universities embraced their third mission, then we would observe a positive effect of university–industry collaborations on firms’ subsequent innovation outputs. Empirical results based on a sample of the top 100 Chinese electronic firms in terms of output value support our hypothesis. Specifically, university patent licensing and co-patenting between universities and firms was found to positively affect firm innovation outputs. Moreover, we found that geographical distance and collaboration dominance moderate the co-patenting–innovation output relationship.