Is collaboration with universities really beneficial for firms?

This paper focuses on the relationship between firms’ innovative performance and different forms of academic cooperation for innovation, paying a specific attention to the role of Universities as sources of information. We build a dataset merging information drawn from two different surveys carried out by the Bank of Italy between 2007 and 2010. We show that the impact for firms of partnering with universities, in terms of the likelihood of producing a drastic innovation, is significant and increases as the level and quality of engagement increases. Thus, Universities may represent a privileged source of knowledge for firm. A tighter collaboration between firms and universities is associated with greater degree of novelty of innovation.