The role of the academic relations of former graduate students in university-firm collaboration

This paper investigates the contribution of the personal ties of former graduate students to university-firm collaboration. Using the proximity framework and the underlying assumptions of social proximity, we argue that the academic relations these students developed through graduate education can reduce the social distance between universities and firms, thus favoring collaborative research and technology transfer. Based on this argument, two hypotheses are presented to explain how the hiring of a former graduate student is associated with firms’ collaboration decisions, constituting a driver of technology transfer. We empirically test these hypotheses with a new empirical strategy and use a novel and comprehensive dataset on university-industry linkages in Brazil. We find that approximately 40% of the collaborations were developed by firms with ‘socially proximate’ research groups, i.e., those hosted by universities where one or more firm employees attended graduate education. The estimates suggest that if a research group is socially proximate to a firm, the latter is more likely to choose this research group to partner with (relative odds approximately 2.5 times higher) and to engage in collaboration with (odds ratio more than 8 times higher). These results suggest new approaches for policy support to these partnerships, using academic relations as a lever to new collaborative projects.