Title: Effects of control in open innovation: an empirical study of university-industry cooperation in China

Authors: Guannan Xu; Yuan Zhou; Lei Xu; Shichao Li

Addresses: School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China ' School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China ' School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China ' Yangtze Delta Region Institute of Tsinghua University, Jiaxing, China

Abstract: Limited research about open innovation has examined in the influence of control modes on the performance of university-industry cooperation. This paper, therefore, attempts to find the impacts and concrete conveying links of diverse control modes on the performance of open innovation in the context of university-industry cooperation in China. This paper categorises control modes into behaviour control and output control, and also introduces knowledge transfer as mediator variable that links control and cooperation performance in explicit and tacit ways. Based on literature, this paper proposes seven hypotheses and uses structural equation modelling to validate them through analysing data collected from 212 questionnaires across China. As a result, this paper finds that industry-university cooperation, especially when featuring knowledge flow and sharing, should pay more attention to behaviour control, rather than over-emphasise output control as is stated in existing literature.

Keywords: open innovation; university-industry cooperation; knowledge transfer; behaviour control; output control; industrial collaboration; China; universities; structural equation modelling; SEM; knowledge flow; knowledge sharing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTPM.2014.065010

International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, 2014 Vol.14 No.4, pp.346 - 363

Received: 21 Oct 2013
Accepted: 04 Mar 2014
Published online: 28 Oct 2014 *

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