Journal of Intellectual Capital

University knowledge, open innovation and technological capital in Spanish science

parks : Research revealing or technology selling?
Manuel Villasalero,
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science parks: Research revealing or technology selling?", Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 15 Issue: 4,
pp.479-496, https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-07-2014-0083
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Research
University knowledge, open revealing or
innovation and technological technology
selling?
capital in Spanish science parks
Research revealing or technology selling? 479
Manuel Villasalero Received 1 July 2014
Revised 1 July 2014
Department of Business Administration, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Accepted 3 July 2014
Ciudad Real, Spain
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Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between university research and
technological capital developed by science park (SCP) firms in order to elucidate whether the causal
linkage is owing to non-pecuniary research spillovers or pecuniary technology transfer activities.
Design/methodology/approach – Two publicly available surveys, one dealing with the research
and transfer activities of 45 Spanish universities and another with the patenting activities of 44
Spanish SCPs, are matched in such a way that hypotheses can be tested using regression analysis.
Findings – The patenting performance of SCP firms is positively related to the competitive R&D
projects undertaken by the universities to which they are affiliated and negatively related to the
technology transfer activities carried out by those universities. These findings suggest that the
scientific knowledge produced by universities principally contributes to private technology-based
firms’ technological capital through non-pecuniary research spillovers, whereas the pecuniary
technology transfer agreements remain uncertain or may even prove to be detrimental.
Practical implications – Firms that are considering locating or remaining in a university-affiliated
SCP should be aware that the university’s pecuniary orientation when managing its intellectual capital
may become a barrier as regards the firm filling its technological capital shortages. From a university
administrator perspective, the complementary or substitute role of technology transfer offices vis-à-vis
SCPs should be considered in the light of the selling or revealing approach adopted by the university in
order to commercialize and diffuse potential inventions.
Originality/value – This study contributes to existing literature by shedding light on the causal
linkage between university research and firm innovation, obtaining evidence in favor of an upstream,
non-pecuniary and revealing role of universities in support of the accumulation of technological
capital amongst SCPs tenant firms.
Keywords Intellectual capital, Knowledge spillovers, Knowledge transfer, Licensing income,
Patents, Tacit knowledge
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
Knowledge, creativity and innovation have become increasingly important for those
firms that wish to remain competitive in the marketplace (Schiavone and Villasalero,
2013), thus pushing them to tap into knowledge networks, either within or outside
organizational boundaries (Büchel and Raub, 2002; Inkpen and Tsang, 2005). Firms
can rely on intra-organizational knowledge networks such as those arising in
multi-business firms (Villasalero, 2014a), multinational corporations (Williams and
Lee, 2009), multidivisional organizations (Nerkar and Paruchuri, 2005), team-based Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 15 No. 4, 2014
pp. 479-496
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The author would like to thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive and 1469-1930
helpful comments on the paper. DOI 10.1108/JIC-07-2014-0083
 JIC organizations (Hoegl et al., 2003) or combinations of the above (Hansen et al., 2005).
15,4 On the inter-organizational level, firms may benefit from geographically dispersed
knowledge networks as is the case of international alliances and partnerships
(Hagedoorn ,2002) or geographically bounded knowledge networks consisting of
countries (Villasalero et al., 2012), industrial districts (Boschma and ter Wal, 2007),
business clusters (Giuliani, 2007), innovative milieus (Todtling and Trippl, 2007),
480 regional innovation systems (Cooke, 2008), science parks (SCPs) (Koc¸ak and Can, 2014)
and business incubators (Soetanto and Jack, 2013).
The studies dealing with the performance advantages of being located within a SCP
abound with predominantly mixed results, particularly when on-park firms are
compared with matched samples of off-park firms (Link and Scott, 2014; Phan et al.,
2005). These findings run counter to the theoretically grounded claims concerning the
value-added contributions of SCPs to tenant firms’ physical, financial and intellectual
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capital. With regard to the latter, it is argued that tenant firms may benefit from
high-quality human resources (human capital), key technologies and innovation-related
knowledge (technological capital) and highly regarded corporate reputation (relational
capital) derived from being located in an SCP with preferential access to the
university’s graduates, staff, research projects, patent portfolios, public recognition
and social legitimacy, aside from more the tangible advantages of housing (physical
capital) and venture capital (financial capital) (Massey et al., 1992). These studies
revolve around the tenant firms’ behavior but overlook the university side. In fact, the
behavior of the focal universities in SCPs remains a largely neglected issue in this field
of research (Link and Scott, 2003).
This study explores the overlooked issue of how the focal university’s behavior
conditions SCPs tenant firms’ accumulation of technological capital. In particular, the
university strategy used to manage its technological capital is argued to impact on the
tenants’ ability to improve their own technological capital. Taking an open innovation
perspective (Chesbrough, 2003, 2006), SCPs and technology transfer offices (TTOs) are
conceptualized as alternate intermediaries through which research-based knowledge
may become a potential innovation, with SCPs favoring non-pecuniary knowledge
spillovers and TTOs fostering pecuniary transfer efforts. The university could
therefore use the best known classification of open innovation strategies (Dahlander
and Gann, 2010) in order to adopt either a “selling” strategy based on R&D contracts
and TTOs or a “revealing” strategy based on R&D projects and SCPs. According to
this open innovation theoretical framework, it is hypothesized that selling hampers
tenant firms’ accumulation of technological capital, whereas revealing improves it.
The findings support the hypothesized relationships between the tenant’s
accumulation of technological capital and the strategy used by the university to
manage intellectual capital. The tenants’ patenting outcomes increase with university
R&D projects and decrease with university R&D contacts and the size of the university
TTO, thus suggesting that a selling strategy is detrimental to tenants’ technological
capital whereas a revealing strategy is, on the contrary, beneficial to it. These findings
are based on two matched samples of 44 SCPs and 45 universities in Spain that account
for the vast majority of universities and SCPs.
This study contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the best the way in which
university research-based knowledge can be absorbed by private firms in order to
foster innovations for the well-being of society as a whole (Mowery et al., 2001; Nelson,
2001). In the Spanish case, the results suggest that knowledge spillovers through SCPs
are preferable to research transfer through TTOs, at least as regards the technological
 capital accumulation of tenant firms. This study also makes theoretical contributions Research
to the fields of intellectual capital and open innovation by showing the new horizons revealing or
that open innovation models may open up with regard to furthering the understanding
of firms’ intellectual capital accumulation in a context-specific situation, as is the case technology
of SCPs. selling?
2. Theory and hypotheses 481
The underlying logic for SCPs is that “[y] universities have many brilliant people
making new discoveries but that they lack the means or the will to reach out to the
market. SCPs constitute a channel by which academic science may be linked to commerce.
Thus SCPs are there to promote, not ‘science,’ but its application to technology”
(Massey et al., 1992, p. 56). More specifically, SCP tenant firms are argued to be in
a position to build up intellectual capital from three types of networks:
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(1) the ties with the universities (Colombo and Delmastro, 2002; Dettwiler et al.,
2006; Fukugawa, 2006; Löfsten and Lindelöf, 2003, 2005);
(2) the ties among tenants (Chan et al., 2010; Colombo and Delmastro, 2002; Koc¸ak
and Can, 2014); and
(3) the ties between tenant firms and stakeholders outside the SCP boundaries
(Löfsten and Lindelöf, 2003; Chan et al., 2010).
2.1 SCPs and intellectual capital
The three types of networks mentioned above allow on-park firms to accelerate the
accumulation of intellectual capital beyond the more visible benefits derived from
premier housing (physical capital) and available venture capital (financial capital).
Their preferential access to universities’ graduates and staff, research projects and
patent portfolios, along with public recognition and social legitimacy are levers for the
accumulation of human, technological and relational capital, respectively.
Universities are the recipients of talented people, explore the frontiers of scientific
knowledge, have cutting-edge technologies and enjoy widely held social legitimacy
(Huggins et al., 2008). On-park firms may benefit from these valuable assets as a result
of their geographic proximity to and collaborative climate with the university to which
the SCP is affiliated (Sorenson et al., 2006). Tenant firms are thus in a position to
accumulate intellectual capital at a greater pace than similar firms located elsewhere,
which may in turn create and sustain performance differentials between on-park and
off-park firms. The evidence amassed to date is, however, contradictory in this regard
(Link and Scott, 2014; Phan et al., 2005; Siegel et al., 2003b). Some studies have found
that on-park firms outperform off-park firms in final performance outcomes such as
survival, growth and profitability (Westhead and Storey, 1995), whereas other studies
have detected that negligible advantages are derived from SCP membership (Ferguson
and Olofsson, 2004; Lindelöf and Löfsten, 2003, 2004; Westhead and Storey, 1994;
Westhead et al., 1995). Leaving aside the final performance outcomes, the existing
evidence on differentials between on-park and off-park firms in intellectual capital
indicators is also mixed.
The study of relational capital in SCPs has attracted considerable attention over the
last few years (Martı́nez-Cañas and Ruiz-Palomino, 2010), but the most frequently
studied component of intellectual capital in SCPs is technological capital, which has
been widely proxied through the tenant firms’ R&D activities and patenting behavior.
Some studies have found that on-park firms outperform off-park firms in patenting
 JIC outcomes (Squicciarini, 2008; Yang et al., 2009) and research productivity (Siegel et al.,
15,4 2003a), whereas the results derived from other studies do not detect such differentials
(Chan et al., 2011; Lindelöf and Löfsten, 2002).
Various theoretical explanations have been advanced to account for the fact that
SCP membership does not always entail the advantages predicted in terms of
performance outcomes or intellectual capital accumulation, such as the excessive
482 dependence on the SCP’s knowledge network (Broekel and Boschma, 2012; Howells,
2012), the lack of heterogeneous and external knowledge inflows for tenant firms (van
Geenhuizen and Soetanto, 2012), the unintended dissemination of knowledge between
tenant firms (Breschi and Lissoni, 2001) or the frictional assimilation of knowledge by
tenant firms (Hansson et al., 2005; Schillaci et al., 2012). The first two explanations
are rooted in a social network perspective and can be summarized within the problem
of over-embeddedness (Andersen, 2013) or, more generally, the issue of the optimal
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level of network embeddedness (Andersen, 2011) which also includes the possibility
of very low levels of networking and their corresponding disadvantages as regards
under-embeddedness. The last two explanations, which are based on knowledge and
organizational learning perspectives, revolve around the issue of knowledge stickiness
and the problems linked to knowledge transfer such as the unintended dissemination
and defective assimilation of knowledge (Villasalero, 2013).
The aforementioned explanations only considers the SCP side of the coin and leave
aside the university side. In almost all studies in this field of inquiry the universities’
behavior is simply overlooked in order to focus interest on the SCP dynamics as
regards either the tenant firms’ behavior or the SCP’s influence on them. Put in other
terms, current research into SCPs neglects how the knowledge source’s behavior
impacts on the receiver’s knowledge stock. It is as if all the responsibility for the
research-based knowledge transference lies downstream, thus assuming that the
upstream source has nothing to do but simply passively play its role of knowledge
provider. This biased research trajectory is evident when existing empirical studies are
classified according to the unit of analysis (as in Fukugawa, 2006, p. 386), which
reveals that the predominant choices are the tenant firm or the SCP with only one study
adopting the university as the unit of analysis. In this unique case (Link and Scott,
2003) the research question is how having an SCP impacts on the university rather
than the other way around, which is the research question posed in this study.
Another related gap in the research on SCPs is that of the theoretical perspective
adopted. As indicated previously, social network, knowledge-based and organizational
learning perspectives are frequently used in the analysis of the upstream side of the
phenomenon. Surprisingly, and despite its notable development in recent years
(Chesbrough, 2003, 2006, 2011), no attempt has been made to apply an open innovation
approach to the analysis of the upstream side, that is to say, the universities’ behavior
in innovation-related issues. The two intended contributions of this study are therefore
to bring universities back into the picture in the research on SCPs and to do so by
adopting an open innovation paradigm.

2.2 Universities strategies for open innovation

The open innovation paradigm advocates a more porous means to allow firms to
manage innovations in order to remain competitive in the marketplace (Schroll and
Mild, 2011). Rather than vertically integrating the production and commercialization of
innovations as was the rule in the past, the open innovation perspective considers the
advantageous separation of both stages in such a way that firms can innovate by
 relying on outside technologies and ideas and to make it possible for others to innovate Research
by using the firms’ own technologies and ideas (Villasalero, 2014b). revealing or
University research-based knowledge is an important external source of innovation
for firms in an open innovation context (West and Bogers, 2014) since universities are technology
major producers of technologies and new ideas, while they are not interested in the selling?
commercialization of the innovations that are based on them to the same degree.
Despite the fact that universities around the world are increasingly profiting from 483
research-based knowledge in various ways (Perkmann and West, 2014), they are not,
nor can nor should probably be, commercial enterprises (Nelson, 2001; Sterckx, 2011).
The imbalanced profile of universities as powerful producers of innovation-related
knowledge and poor marketers of commercial innovations leaves room for private
firms to tap into university knowledge as a key external source of innovation. In fact,
industrial innovation has always been based on academic research, which has also laid
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the foundations for corporate and government research in some industries (Furman
and MacGarvie, 2009). Overall, academic research accounts exclusively for more than
10 percent of corporate innovations and plays a determining role in more than
20 percent of them, with peak contributions being as high as 25 and 35 percent,
respectively, in industries such as those that produce drugs and medical products
(Mansfield, 1991, 1998).
The fact that academic research is an external source of innovation for private firms
is not new. What is new is the dramatic change in the mechanisms that allow
innovating firms to gain access to university research-based knowledge. Before the
1980s, universities hardly had patents, licenses or spin-offs, and even the amounts of
R&D contracts were quite modest. From the 1980s onwards, the number of patents,
licenses, spin-offs and R&D contracts expanded exponentially around the world, first
in the USA and later in Europe and Japan. The reasons behind this radical change in
the way that universities manage their intellectual capital are somewhat controversial,
with some studies adducing normative changes in the intellectual property system
such as the Bayh-Dole Act in the USA (Fabrizio, 2006), others referring to the maturity
of some academic disciplines such as biochemistry or computer science (Mowery et al.,
2001; Nelson, 2001), and others even attributing it to a more applied orientation in the
recent academic research carried out at universities (Cohen et al., 2002; Mansfield,
1998). Leaving aside the reasons behind these fundamental changes, this study is
interested in their implications for universities and, specifically, how universities confront
the issue of managing their intellectual capital and what, if any, the consequences are
for private firms that are willing to tap into university knowledge-based research.
Using the widely known classification of strategies for open innovation advanced by
Dahlander and Gann (2010), according to which the organizations that produce
technologies in excess of those which can be commercialized may opt for the pecuniary
selling or non-pecuniary revealing of their technological capital, it follows that
universities have massively changed from revealing (before the 1980s) to selling (from the
1980s onwards), and that this change has and currently entails considerable implications
for those private firms that are seeking to accumulate technological capital from
academic research.

2.3 Universities strategies and technology transfer

In accordance with its principles and academic missions (Link and Scott, 2003; Sterckx,
2011), a specific university may choose a strategy with which to manage its
technological capital along the continuum between the extreme positions of pure
 JIC revealing and pure selling. This choice has implications for the channels and conduits
15,4 used by private firms to access such technological capital and the predominant form
that the technology transfer takes.
The paradigmatic technology transfer channels in a revealing strategy are those of
scientific publications and informal interactions. Academic scientists are accustomed
to sharing their findings in scientific publications and conferences in the open domain.
484 Evidence suggests that publications and reports represent by far the largest channel
through which industrial research benefits from public research, as indicated by 41.2
percent of industrial R&D managers in a large US sample study. Other non-pecuniary
industry-university channels that are highly related to publications in the open domain
include informal interactions and meetings and conferences, which have the second
and third largest impact on industrial research. What is more, the flow of recent
graduates from universities to industry is also an important non-pecuniary channel
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(Cohen et al., 2002). These findings are parallel to those obtained from European firms,
according to which publications, informal contacts, hiring and conferences are the
most important sources of industrial innovation from public research (Arundel et al.,
1995). Knowledge spillovers are the mechanism used by private firms to access
research findings, prototypes and techniques that are openly available in published
research and conferences and are complemented with informal contacts and the recent
hiring of university graduates (Salter and Martin, 2001).
Alternatively, the paradigmatic technology transfer channels in a selling strategy
are those of licensing and contact research. In both cases, the private firms have
to pay to access university research-based knowledge, the only difference being
whether the knowledge transferred is protectable or non-protectable, respectively.
Patents and licenses were considered as significant transfer channels by more than
10 percent of US industrial R&D managers, whereas contract research and
consulting agreements were mentioned by more than 25 percent of them (Cohen et al.,
2002). In a parallel European study, contract research was rated as important by
36 percent of respondents (Arundel et al., 1995). Knowledge trade is the mechanism
used by private firms to access the research-based codified knowledge in the form
of patents and licenses, or tacit knowledge in the form of contract research and
consulting agreements.
Not only do the transfer channels and mechanisms differ depending upon the
revealing or selling strategy adopted by universities in order to manage their
intellectual capital, but so do the organizational arrangements set up to intermediate
the university-industry relationships. A selling strategy requires the university to have
a well-developed TTO in charge of the task of protecting, marketing and brokering the
research-based knowledge in order to generate R&D contract revenues and licensing
income (Caldera and Deband, 2010).
A revealing strategy, however, involves organizational arrangements that promote
knowledge spillovers to interested firms. Research on knowledge spillovers has
uncovered that this type of knowledge transfer is unintended, untraded and
geographically localized (Salter and Martin, 2001). Many studies indicate that the
results of academic research do not flow geographically in a regular manner, but tend to
be locally concentrated since the tacitness of knowledge requires face-to-face interactions
amongst the people who embody the technological knowledge to be transferred (Storper,
1995). These interactions are usually untraded, and this creates a social environment in
which the reciprocal sharing of knowledge between entrepreneurs and scientists
flourishes, thus resulting in place-specific and context-dependent technology transfer flows.
 Consistent with this view of localized knowledge spillovers, Mansfield and Research
Lee (1996) found that firms which are less distant from where academic research revealing or
occurs are more likely to be the first to apply the findings of this research than more
distant firms. SCPs are among the organizational arrangements that are designed to technology
promote and enhance knowledge spillovers between university research and industrial selling?
innovation (Massey et al., 1992).
In accordance with the view described above, in which SCPs are typical 485
organizational arrangements for the fostering of knowledge spillovers and TTOs
play the counterpart role for knowledge trade, this study contends that the university
contribution to the tenants’ technological capital accumulation cannot be adequately
analyzed without taking the university strategy for managing its intellectual capital
into account as an endogenous variable (Table I).
In particular, the adoption of a revealing strategy is predicted to be beneficial for
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the tenant firms’ technological capital accumulation, whereas the application of

a selling strategy is expected to be detrimental. The following two hypotheses are thus
put forward:

H1. A university’s revealing strategy has a positive impact on SCP tenant firms’
technological capital accumulation.

H2. A university’s selling strategy has a negative impact on SCP tenant firms’
technological capital accumulation.

3. Methods
An exploratory testing of the hypotheses was designed by using Spanish SCPs and the
universities to which they are affiliated.

3.1 Setting and research design

Two publicly available databases were matched in order to bring university behavior
back into the analysis of the relationship between SCP membership and tenant
firms’ technological capital accumulation. One database is compiled by the national
association of Spanish universities, formally called the Conference of Spanish
University Rectors (CRUE), and includes self-reported information on the research and
knowledge transfer activities of almost all Spanish universities (CRUE, 2011). Another
database is elaborated by the national association of Spanish SCPs, formally called the
Association of Science and Technology Parks in Spain (APTE), which includes
self-reported information on patents granted by the Spanish Patent and Trademark
Office (OEPM) to tenant firms located in almost all Spanish SCPs (APTE, 2011).

Key differences Revealing strategy Selling strategy

Nature of knowledge transfer Knowledge spillovers Knowledge trade

Logic of knowledge transfer
Knowledge transfer channels
Position on the value chain
Organizational arrangements
Non-pecuniary Pecuniary
Scientific publications Contract research Table I.
Research projects Licensing income Open innovation
PhD graduates Spinning off strategies used by
Upstream Downstream universities to manage
Science parks (SCPs) Technology transfer offices (TTOs) technological capital
 JIC Both databases refer to the year 2010. Although it would have been preferable to
15,4 introduce a lag between university research and knowledge transfer activities and
SCP tenant firms’ patenting outcomes, it was impossible to do so because the latter
information was only available in 2010 and the former information before 2010 is not
as complete as in 2010. The use of a contemporary cross-section sample was therefore
imposed by data availability.
486
3.2 Measures
The procedure used to match the two databases was straightforward, resulting in
44 SCPs paired with the corresponding 45 universities to which they are affiliated. The
dependent variable is the tenant firm’s technological capital accumulation on the SCP
database (APTE, 2011) and the independent variables are the research and knowledge
transfer activities undertaken by the university to which the SCP is affiliated on the
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university database (CRUE, 2011).

Technological capital accumulation. The patenting performance of SCP tenant firms
was used as a proxy of technological capital accumulation. Despite the known
shortcoming of disregarding the accumulation of non-protectable technological
knowledge, it is a widely accepted measure of technological capital. The final measure
is the simple count of the number of patents granted by the Spanish Patent and
Trademark Office (OEPM) to the tenant firms sampled.
Revealing strategy. Three indicators were chosen to approximate the level to which
a concrete university is committed to a revealing strategy as regards managing its
intellectual capital, these being competitive funded research projects, scientific
publications and PhD graduates. As indicated above, major channels of university
knowledge spillovers to private firms include scientific publications and the recent
hiring of university graduates, which are in turn based on the basic research
undertaken at the university (Arundel et al., 1995; Cohen et al., 2002; Salter and Martin,
2001). Of the three, the most robust measure of knowledge spillovers in the Spanish
university system is that of competitive funded basic research, since the distribution of
publicly funded research follows a rigorous and time-consuming procedure that
produces highly efficient allocations of funds. The remaining indicators are used with
caution in this study, because the number of scientific publications is a gross measure
that is unadjusted to the quality of the publication, whereas the number of PhD graduates
could make little sense in this study given the scant valuation of PhD degrees in
Spain-based industry. They are, nonetheless, retained in this study in order to ensure
comparability with similar studies. These three measures were taken from the
self-reported figures contained in the university database (CRUE, 2011).
Selling strategy. The university’s commitment to a selling strategy was measured by
using license revenues, contract research income and the size of the TTO. Given that
Spanish universities are just beginning to patent and obtain license revenues, contract
research income is a much better indicator of knowledge trade than license revenues in
this regard, but the license revenue variable was retained on the grounds of
comparability issues. Similarly, TTOs are also widespread organizational solutions
that are adopted in the Spanish university system to promote knowledge trade. These
three measures were also taken from the self-reported figures provided in the
university database (CRUE, 2011). The license revenues and contract research income
were measured in thousands of euros, while the size of the TTO was measured as the
natural logarithm of the full-time equivalent number of employees working in these
offices (Caldera and Debande, 2010).
 Control variables. Three variables were used to control for the varying impact of Research
universities on SCP tenant firms other than those derived from research and knowledge revealing or
transfer activities. The public or private property, the generalist or polytechnic character
and the number of academic scientists of the focal university were considered. The first technology
two variables were dummy variables indicating whether the university is a private selling?
and/or polytechnic university, respectively. The last variable accounts for the scientific
size of the university by counting the number of academic scientists. Again, the property 487
and character of the university would be non-meaningful because the numbers of
private and polytechnic universities are very small in comparison to other countries’
university systems.

3.3 Statistical analysis

Given that the dependent variable is a count measure (number of patents granted to
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tenant firms), a negative binomial regression is preferable to an ordinary least square

(OLS) regression. The results of the OLS regression are, however, the same as those
derived from the best-fitted negative binomial regression (negative binomial parameter
free and logarithm linkage function). Since the statistics and goodness of fit tests of the
OLS regression are more familiar than those resulting from negative binomial
regressions, the former results are subsequently reported in this study in order to
facilitate the interpretation of the findings.

4. Results
Multicollinearity is an issue, since some correlations are above 0.4, particularly those
representing the university size effect and the polytechnic university effect on the
research and knowledge transfer variables (Table II).
Only two independent variables significantly correlate with the dependent
variable SCP tenant firms’ technological capital accumulation, and these are the
number of academic scientists and the amount of competitive funding raised for
basic research. With regard to the correlations amongst the independent variables,
the size effect is that the greater the scientific base of the university, the greater the
university research and knowledge transfer outcomes. Both private and polytechnic
universities have a well-differentiated profile. Private universities in Spain are
smaller, raise less competitive funding for research, publish less scientific findings,
educate less PhD graduates and have smaller TTOs than their public counterparts.
Polytechnic universities attract greater amounts of competitive funding for
research, collect more licensing revenues, have more contract research incomes
and have larger TTOs than generalist universities. The potential multicollinearity
issue was confronted by inspecting the variance inflation factors (VIF) in the
regression models.
The dependent variable technological capital accumulation is regressed in all the
variables in Model 1, whereas scientific publications and licensing revenues have been
exclude from Model 2 in order to improve the overall goodness of fit and to keep all the
VIF values below the 5.0 threshold above which regression estimators become unstable
(Cohen et al., 2003). The results from both models are basically the same, with the
exception of that of academic scientists, which attains marginally statistical
significance in the best-fitted model (Table III).
Partially consistent with the first hypotheses concerning the effects of a university
revealing strategy, the results show that the amount of competitive funding for basic
research raised by the university has beneficial effects on tenant firms’ technological
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JIC
15,4

488

Table II.
Descriptive
statistics and Pearson
correlation coefficients
Descriptives Pearson correlation
Variable Mean SD 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

1. Technological capital accumulation 3.043 3.155 1

2. Private universitya 0.110 0.312 0.005 1
3. Polytechnic universitya 0.060 0.247 0.031 0.090 1
4. Academic scientists 2,080.890 1,457.819 0.315* 0.386** 0.138 1
5. Competitive basic research funding 13,000.210 11,389.212 0.386* 0.346* 0.325* 0.794** 1
6. Scientific publications 921.880 883.727 0.137 0.390* 0.128 0.827** 0.670** 1
7. PhD graduates 165.560 167.064 0.161 0.319*** 0.147 0.890** 0.726** 0.776** 1
8. Licensing revenue 052.968 083.331 0.060 0.167 0.586** 0.461** 0.360* 0.424* 0.405* 1
9. Contract research income 08,549.510 12,328.976 0.040 0.224 0.642** 0.494** 0.688** 0.452** 0.388* 0.540** 1
10. Technology transfer office sizeb 0.793 0.295 0.057 0.428** 0.284*** 0.503** 0.510** 0.563** 0.503** 0.284*** 0.371* 1
a b
Notes: n ¼ 47. Dummy variable (Kendall and Spearman correlation coefficients provide similar results to those shown). Natural logarithm transformation to
correct for skewness. **po0.01 (two-tailed); *po0.05 (two-tailed); ***po0.10 (two-tailed)
 Unstandardized coefficients with standard
Research
errors in parentheses revealing or
Effect Variable Model 1 full model Model 3 best model technology
Control Constant 3.200 3.200 selling?
(0.400) (0.390)
Private university 0.285 0.290
(0.460) (0.449)
489
Polytechnic university 0.351 0.466
(0.653) (0.550)
Academic scientists 1.510 1.664***
(1.064) (0.930)
Revealing Competitive basic research funding 2.900** 2.792**
strategy (0.888) (0.816)
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Scientific publications 0.022

(0.865)
PhD graduates 1.878*** 1.861*
(0.965) (0.889)
Selling Licensing revenue 0.290
strategy (0.622)
Contract research income 1.821* 1.773*
(0.737) (0.698)
Technology transfer office size 0.908*** 0.917***
(0.524) (0.498)
Goodness R2 adjusted 0.244 0.280
of fit R2 0.392 0.390
F 2.653* 3.562**
N 47 47
Table III.
Notes: Dependent variable: technological capital accumulation. **po0.01; *po0.05; ***po0.10 OLS regression

capital accumulation, in contrast with the unexpected negative effect that PhD
graduates have on it. The results conform with the second hypothesis which contends
that a university selling strategy is detrimental to SCP tenant firms’ technological
capital accumulation, with significant and negative signs for contract research income
and TTO size.

5. Discussion
Consistent with the literature review, the revealing strategy was proxied by using the
amount of funding raised for basic research, the number of scientific publications
and the number of PhD graduates. Consistent with the first hypothesis and in
conformity with expectations, the amount of funding raised for basic research is
the best indicator of knowledge spillovers in this study sample. As indicated in the
methods section, the system used to allocate funds to basic research in Spain
produces near-efficient results and is thus a good indicator of the level to which
a university can contribute toward expanding publicly available scientific knowledge
to society. The number of scientific publications did not eventually enter the
best-fitted regression model, probably because the measure used failed to adjust for
the quality of the publications.
Contrary to the first hypothesis, the impact of the number of PhD graduates has
a negative impact on SCPs tenant firms’ technological capital accumulation, which is
not, however, an unexpected result in light of the singularities of the Spanish labor
 JIC market and university system. In Spain, the fact of being a PhD graduate is of
15,4 virtually no significance in the labor market, even amongst high-tech firms.
As a result, in the last decade most PhD graduates have followed an academic career
in universities and research centers rather than breaking into the labor market and
spilling leading-edge knowledge regarding scientific findings, modern techniques
and prototyping experience amongst employer firms. Rather than promoting
490 knowledge spillovers with PhD graduates, the situation is just the opposite in Spain;
most talented people who qualify for a PhD are retained within the university and
research system and prevented from going to industrial R&D laboratories. This does
not mean that the education of PhD graduates is detrimental to technological capital
accumulation or innovation, but that the locus in which these outcomes are collected
have, to date, been principally universities, and that the knowledge transfer
mechanism based on knowledge spillovers has been fairly limited in this regard.
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Future studies may investigate whether PhD graduates are more related to the
knowledge transfer mechanism based on the knowledge trade in Spain and what,
if any, are the effects of the recent incorporations of PhD graduates into the labor
market as a consequence of their limited remaining opportunities as regards
following an academic career in the current Spanish university system.
The selling strategy was measured by using licensing revenue, contract research
income and the size of the TTO. As expected, licensing revenue is still not a good
indicator given the limited experience of Spanish universities in this respect and the
uneven distribution of licenses and licensing income amongst them. With the exception
of polytechnic universities, Spanish universities are just starting to patent and sign
licensing agreements, and are therefore quite inexperienced in comparison with their
German, Japan and US counterparts. In contrast, contract research income and TTOs
are well-developed phenomena in the Spanish university system, thus appropriately
representing the emphasis placed by a concrete university on selling its research-based
knowledge. Consistent with the hypothesis, this emphasis is counterproductive to the
SCP tenant firms’ technological capital accumulation.
The findings deriving from this study have implications for research on SCPs,
intellectual capital and economics of science. The studies on SCPs’ consequences for
tenant firms have placed too much emphasis on the SCP side, whilst leaving the
university side unexplored (Fukugawa, 2006). This study is the first to consider
the impact of focal university policies on tenant firms located in the SCP to which
that university contributes (Link and Scott, 2014). Put in other terms, the recipients
(tenant firms; SCPs) are not the only important entities as regards inter-organizational
knowledge transfer taking place, and the providers (research groups; universities)
are also at least as important as them. The type of multi-level approach adopted
in this study is illustrative of the new horizons that may be opened up by
combining both sides of the knowledge transfer process and different actors within
each side.
Research efforts on intellectual capital and open innovation have remained
surprisingly isolated from one another, when they are in fact dealing with a common
core issue which is the access to and accumulation of valuable intangible resources.
This study shows how the research on the technological component of intellectual
capital can be enriched by using an open innovation perspective around the options of
revealing and selling (Dahlander and Gann, 2010). Future studies may explore the
consequences of building technological capital derived from the remaining open
innovation options based on sourcing and acquiring.
 Although this study focusses on the limited-scope issue of technological capital Research
accumulation within SCPs, its findings are relevant to the so-called economics of revealing or
science, i.e., how science dynamics impacts on innovation and economic development
(Stephan, 1996). Central to the present study is the idea that knowledge transfer from technology
universities to interested parties in society can take at least two forms, such as selling?
knowledge spillovers and knowledge trade, and that the former is sometimes
preferable to the latter. Contrary to the movement which advocates more applied 491
research and a strong emphasis on technology transfer in universities, the findings
derived from this study indicate that knowledge spillovers are in fact a technology
transfer mechanism, something that is usually overlooked by the aforementioned
advocates, and is that which renders benefits for private firms when coupled with
appropriate organizational solutions such as SCPs. There would appear to be no
contradiction between untraded publicly funded basic science in the open domain and
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an efficient knowledge transfer to make university research-based knowledge

a powerful driver of technological innovation undertaken by private firms. In this
respect, this study adds to the growing evidence-driven literature that questions
whether a strong emphasis on selling technology amongst universities could better
serve the interest of economic advancement than their performing the traditional
strategy of revealing technologies and retaining their dominant role in the upstream of
the science, technology and innovation value chain (Mowery et al., 2001; Nelson, 2001;
Sterckx, 2011).

6. Conclusion
These results support the view held in this study that research on SCPs should
consider the innovation-related behavior of the university to which the SCP is affiliated.
Given that SCPs are organizational solutions that are designed to promote knowledge
spillovers rather than knowledge trade, it follows that a university strategy that
stresses the untraded free revealing of academic research has beneficial effects on the
SCP tenant firms’ technological capital accumulation. On the contrary, a university
emphasis on the knowledge trade by selling its research through well-developed TTOs
hampers SCPs as regards meeting their objectives of spreading the university
knowledge-based research amongst tenant firms in order for them to accelerate the
process of technological capital accumulation.
This study has limitations owing to the secondary databases on which the testing
of hypotheses is based. Despite the advantage of relying on objective information
from almost all the universities and SCPs in Spain, the data imposed unavoidable
restrictions such as those derived from the contemporary cross-sectional design, the
limited availability of control variables, the lack of SCP variables other than patents
granted to tenant firms and the crude measures of some of the variables. Future
studies may supplement the data used in this study with additional secondary
databases or even survey information collected from universities, SCPs and tenant
firms.
The findings of the study reported herein should be interpreted by bearing in
mind that the Spanish university system is, in many respects, singular, i.e., the low
proportion of private and polytechnic universities, the atypical profile of private
universities, the very early phase that universities are at in terms of patenting,
licensing and spinning off, or the scant valuation of PhD graduates amongst firms.
Given that most of the studies on technology transfer are based on the USA, Central
and Nordic European countries and Japan, the results derived from this study provide
 JIC a different picture of the phenomenon in comparison to those which can be found in
15,4 other studies and should, in this respect, be viewed within the context described.
Future studies may pursue comparisons of multiple countries in order to discern
whether technology transfer is notably conditioned by the features existing in each
country.

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About the author

Manuel Villasalero is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business
Administration at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Spain, from
496 which he received his PhD. He has experience as a Director in several firms and
currently serves as the Vice Chancellor for the Economics and Planning at the
UCLM. His research interests include corporate strategy, knowledge management
and human resource management. He has published articles in International
Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Knowledge Management, Journal of the
Knowledge Economy, Journal of Euromarketing, and others. Manuel Villasalero can be contacted
Downloaded by Prasetiya Mulya University At 21:42 20 March 2018 (PT)

at: manuel.villasalero@uclm.es

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