Theoretical framework

The collaboration and the knowledge transfer between higher education and enterprise are considered some of the essential vectors in the development of effective innovation systems. Indeed, a lot of authors43, research reports and corporate documents have indicated in recent years the benefits of such collaboration recently. Among them, it is mentioned the contribution by the university to the productive sector as for access to the information, the technological infrastructure and the involvement of human resources in the development of their own projects, while the enterprise would contribute to higher education additional funding and improvement of professional profiles, among others.

This has been described in reports as First Findings from the UK Innovation Survey 2007 (Robson and Haigh, 2008), University to business technology transfer-UK and USA Comparisons (Decter, Bennet and Leseur, 2007), Summary Report for Respondents: The ASTP (Association of European Science and Technology Transfer Professionals) Survey for Fiscal Year 2007 (Arundel, Bordoy and Kanerva, 2008), Higher Education-Business and Community Interaction Survey 2008-2009 (Higher Education Funding Council for England, 2010) or The European Innovation Scoreboard 2009 (European Commission, 2010).

However, there are differences among countries regarding with the tradition, the intensity and the effectiveness of such collaboration. So, the world leaders in innovation, such as the United States, have effective transfer mechanisms to industry, appearing in The Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010 (World Economic Forum, 2010) as the first region in the world that collaborates between both sectors. On the other hand, although it is considered the European Union countries are leaders in academic research, these lack the same capacities for technology transfer to industry.

This paper presents the results of a research that has among its objectives to understand the processes of collaboration between enterprise and higher education; specifically, to carry out a comparative analysis on both sectors and to include the perceptions of the research groups directors and business managers in Galician context.

[1]This reseach is financed by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, and FEDER funds, reference: SEJ2007/-67795/EDUC

[2] E-mail: jose.cajide@usc.es

[3] The members of this research group who have been participated in this research are: Porto Castro, A.; Abeal Pereira, C.; Barreiro Fernández, F.; Zamora Rodríguez, E. and Mosteiro García, J.

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