Which services support research activities at universities?

In the current innovation system, governments and society in general are willing universities to serve local economic organisations and to commit to social welfare. As research expenditures have risen, the attention to research performance has also grown. University internal services – principally infrastructures and staff – can contribute to improving research performance. In this paper, the authors confirm this contribution by developing a quantitative analysis on a sample of 62 public and private universities in Spain. It is found that, despite the positive contribution, the importance given to internal services by university management is still not significant. It is also found that, unlike previous studies had suggested, Spanish private universities do not show better research performance than public universities.