Knowledge Exploration and Exploitation in the University-Industry Collaboration

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of knowledge exploration/exploitation and the types of university-industry research collaborative (UIRC) projects on the performance of UIRC projects. In this study, hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses in a sample of 1,703 Taiwanese UIRC projects during the period from 2007 to 2009. The findings suggest that knowledge exploration is positively related to the performance of UIRC projects, while knowledge exploitation has positive interaction effect with exploitative UIRC projects on the performance. Furthermore, we also find that over and above their independent and interaction effects, academic researchers in UIRC projects may enhance the performance by a focus on managing imbalance between knowledge exploration and exploitation. Managerial implications and further research suggestions are discussed.