Assessing spillovers from universities to firms: evidence from French firm-level data

We assess the importance of information flows from universities to innovative firms and determine the relative contribution of formal collaboration and pure knowledge spillovers in this process. We find that spillovers provide the most benefit to firms that imitate existing technologies or those that are involved in incremental innovation. On the other hand, highly innovative firms appear to derive most benefit from collaborative research with foreign universities. Indeed, highly innovative firms are at the frontier of the academic knowledge in their industry. Therefore, they only marginally benefit from aggregate (or industry-wide) spillovers. They require new forms of academic knowledge that they acquire through formal cooperation with foreign universities.