Analysing knowledge transfer channels between universities and industry: To what degree do sectors also matter?

There is a wide variety of channels through which knowledge and technology is being transferred between universities and industry. This paper aims to explain the relative importance of these different channels in different contexts. For this purpose, responses from two questionnaires were analysed, addressing Dutch industrial and university researchers, respectively. A reassuring result is that the perceived importance of the 23 distinct transfer channels we distinguished hardly differs between industry and university: we did not observe a major mismatch. Overall, our results suggest that the industrial activities of firms do not significantly explain differences in importance of a wide variety of channels through which knowledge between university and industry might be transferred. Instead, this variety is better explained by the disciplinary origin, the characteristics of the underlying knowledge, the characteristics of researchers involved in producing and using this knowledge (individual characteristics), and the environment in which knowledge is produced and used (institutional characteristics). Based on our findings, we offer policy recommendations. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.