In the frame of the European Research Area, the reinforcement of the links between the Higher Education and the environment places as one of the key points for the development across the transfer of knowledge and technology generated in the public research centres and the universities. It is considered besides the fact that the development of activities of research and innovation to regional level has a positive influence in the region and in the set of the European capacity of research: connect with the industrial parks of development, creation and support of centres of excellence, creation of scientific and technological parks, mobility of the researchers, etc. In fact, it won’t come to any surprise to researches that there’s a connection between universities and economic prosperity. Sean Safford of the University of Chicago analysed the role of institutions of higher education in transforming mature and declining many industries and concluded that universities are most effective in such regions when they focus their efforts on providing forums and space for industry interaction than when attempt to focus university research on specific types of technology. Therefore, Richard Mattoon (2006), senior economist and economic advisor at the Federal Bank of Chicago wrote: “we must recognize that higher education institutions have different roles and capacities, and it would be unrealistic to expect individual colleges or universities to fulfil all roles”

In this paper presents some results of an investigation that is in Galicia context, in the northwest of Spain, whose aim is to know the mechanisms of collaboration between both sectors (university and business), in order to promote the contribution of the Higher Education to the economy and to the society, principally to regional level, in the own region. To this end, we analyze the results of a questionnaire to gather information on perceptions of Directors of research groups from the three universities in Galicia: Vigo, A Coruña and Santiago. This questionnaire was postal, e-mail and voluntary and the sample is composed of 123 directors of research groups. The number of researches for group range between 1 and 36, so the sample has included one total of 774 researchers in the analysis.

The results that we show in this proposal are about four main aspects: the level of collaboration between universities and industry, what are the areas of enhanced cooperation, reasons to cooperate and the factors that inhibit it. The responses obtained allow us to say that many research groups carry out collaborations with companies (74.5%) and 32.5% say that this cooperation is high.