The role of university-industry collaboration in increasing of innovation performance of businesses: An application on businesses with r&d or design centers

The rapidly growing technology and knowledge-based economies focus on the development of interaction between universities and industry. This approach, not only emphsizes businesses to benefit from information sources and to provide a competitive advantage, at the same time, emphasizes the need to create scientific knowledge and work with universities. Increasing R&D based collaboration with universities is perceived as a tool to develop innovations through more information exchanges by businesses. With this study, which was conducted in order to examine the impact of university and industrial interaction on the innovation performance of the enterprises, both an assesment was made and suggestions for improving the current situation were presented. As a result of the findings obtained, a positive relationship was found between University-Industry Collaboration and the innovation performance of enterprises. It has been seen that the innovation performance of the businesses has increased with the collaboration of the University - Industry with in the framework of the number of new products, number of R&D projects, number of patents and utility models, number of new ideas, number of scientific publications and productivity increase. The high level of satisfaction of enterprises for University - Industry Collaboration has led to an increase in collaboration projects. The increasing number of collaboration projects created the need for additional employment in enterprises. Businesses included in the research also achieved significant benefits in terms of market performance, production performance, financial performance and employee performance. Inadequate information transfer, late payment of fund supports and lack of communication are prioritized among the problems that enterprises face during the University - Industry Collaboration process. Priority suggestions offered by enterprises for the solution of the problems encountered are; encouraging academicians to take more roles in collaboration projects, increasing project support rates and upper limits, and conducting more activities to increase University-Industry Collaboration.