While innovation is viewed as crucial means of promoting competitiveness of rural SMEs, rural areas can be blighted by an ‘underdeveloped innovation environment’. Perhaps due to an urban bias in innovation research, open innovation through university collaboration among rural SMEs has not been extensively examined. Using a dataset of 880 rural SMEs from the UK, the paper suggests that rural SMEs are less likely to collaborate with a university than urban SMEs. Furthermore, higher numbers of employees and export revenues have a positive influence on the propensity to collaborate with a university. In addition, collaborating with organisations such as private laboratories and public sector research institutes increases the propensity to engage in university collaboration.

虽然创新被视为提高农村中小企业竞争力的重要手段，但农村地区可能会受到“不发达的创新环境”的影响。也许由于创新研究中的城市偏向，农村中小企业之间通过大学合作进行的开放式创新尚未得到广泛研究。该论文使用了来自英国 880 家农村中小企业的数据集，表明与城市中小企业相比，农村中小企业与大学合作的可能性较小。此外，更多的员工和出口收入对与大学合作的倾向有积极影响。此外，与私人实验室和公共部门研究机构等组织合作增加了参与大学合作的倾向。