Evaluation of the position and potential of the cities in Turkey within government-university- industry collaboration (GUIC)

University-industry collaboration is an important mechanism that can be a pioneer in the development of a country through the transformation of academic knowledge produced in universities into value-added in industry. Although a system linking between the university and industry was established to be monitored for this ecosystem, there were no efforts to transform them into politics. In this context, the aim of this study was to evaluate the potential of this collaboration for Level 2 (26 Regions) and Level 3 (81 provinces) regional units according to Classification of Statistical Region Units (NUTS) and to identify their needs for ensuring the collaboration and to present them as recommendations to policy makers in order to ensure an effective university-industry collaboration mechanisms in Turkey. Within the scope of the study, potential of this collaboration was examined in two different dimensions as university and industry. 81 provinces are also classified according to their status of having metropolitan status due to the reasons such as resource allocation of provinces and the high number of available alternatives. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposable Hull (FDH) analysis were used in the study and the results were examined comparatively. At the evaluation stage of findings, the targets that would be required to take the role model of the Level 2 and Level 3 regional units and satisfy the decision maker were determined by using FDH method. Super efficiency method was used because of the low power of efficiency in the standard VZA models and the dimensional efficiency scores of the Level 2 and Level 3 regional units for university industry collaboration were obtained. With this study, not only the potentials of the Level 2 and Level 3 regional units for the collaboration have been established but also target based policy proposals were presented to ensure that 26 regions and 81 provinces in terms of NUTS levels within themselves have significant potential of the collaboration compared to other units for bilateral comparisons. Moreover, the provinces having the potential of collaboration that affect the NUTS Level 2 region were also covered within the scope of regional collaboration policies. The uniqueness of this study has revealed that this is the first study in Turkey in terms of modeling the university-industry collaboration and although there have been different studies conducted for the modeling of university-industry collaboration, it is the first study conducted in the context of the method used. Keywords: University-Industry Collaboration, DEA, FDH, super efficiency.