Innovation intermediaries for university-industry R&D collaboration: evidence from science parks in Thailand

This paper investigates how science parks (SPs) act as innovation intermediaries to facilitate university-industry research and development (U-I R&D) collaboration and how the SPs’ roles influence the collaboration effectiveness. Data was collected from documents and interviews with 52 participants in 19 collaboration projects across four SPs in northern Thailand. This data is unique because it includes the perspectives of the SPs’ project managers as well as those of the university researchers, firm owners and managers in a developing economy context. Our findings show that the SPs performed consulting, brokering, mediating, and providing resource roles and thereby enhanced the attributes of researchers, firms, relationships between partners and collaboration projects, to ultimately improve the success of the collaborations. The SPs in Thailand are not only property-based organisations that provide space and facilities for firms to locate in. It is the SPs’ active involvement in the U-I R&D collaboration that contributes to its effectiveness. SPs in a developing economy thus evolve their roles to offer greater support to firms in low-tech industries. We also offer evidence of trade-off effects and show how the SPs’ roles and attributes of firms, researchers and relationships can substitute for one another to create effective U-I R&D collaborations.