The double-edged sword: technological base, university-industry collaboration and technology transfer

Understanding how university technologies are transferred to industry is a central concern in innovation studies. Prior research often assumes linear correlations between university technology base characteristics and technology transfers. We argue that this relationship is non-linear because the same characteristics that increase the potential value of university technologies may also generate transfer frictions. Specifically, technological diversity can broaden technological opportunities but also raise search, screening, and evaluation costs, while technological uniqueness can enhance differentiation but also increase interpretive and commercialisation uncertainty. We further argue that a university’s centrality in the university–industry collaboration network can mitigate these frictions. Using panel data on patent-based university–industry technology transfer from 39 Project 985 universities in China during 2008–2017, we find that both technological diversity and technological uniqueness exhibit inverted U-shaped relationships with technology transfer, and that centrality flattens these relationships.