Academia-industry collaboration, government funding and innovation efficiency in Chinese industrial enterprises

This article uses a stochastic frontier model to elaborate how academia-industry research and development collaboration and government funding influence the innovation efficiency of industrial enterprises through a panel dataset from 2009 to 2015, including 30 provinces in China. We find that the research institute-industry collaboration promotes innovation efficiency of enterprises, while university-industry collaboration is adversely associated with innovation efficiency. Government funding plays a positive role on innovation efficiency across the board. Next, we divide the sample into three clusters according to enterprises’ innovation ability. In the first cluster, which has the least innovation ability, research institute-industry collaboration, university-industry collaboration and government funding have no significant effect on enterprise innovation efficiency. In the second and third clusters, university-industry collaboration exerts a negative impact on innovation efficiency but government funding improves innovation efficiency. At the same time, we investigate the interaction effects of enterprise R&D personnel and academia-industry collaboration and government funding on innovation efficiency. We find some heterogeneity in the full sample and the three sub-samples.