This paper examines the making of university and industry research collaboration from the perspective of matching theory. Our analysis, based on an original survey in Japan, aims at identifying the mechanism of matching. The major findings are as follows. There is significant evidence for positive assortative matching at the project level: a researcher with better seeds or better needs gives a higher value to the partner’s research capability and the goodness-of-fit between the project and the partner’s capability in selecting its partner. The projects with the partners selected for research capability and goodness-of-fit are associated with high university and industry research collaboration performance. Furthermore, own contact is most used for positive assortative matching. These results indicate the importance of deep field knowledge and tacit knowledge of the researcher in the search process. These findings suggest that technology transfer policy would need to pay significant attention to the contribution of the decentralized matching process.

中文翻译：

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大学与产业研究合作：来自日本共同发明的证据

本文从匹配理论的角度考察了产学研合作的形成。我们的分析基于日本的一项原始调查，旨在确定匹配机制。主要发现如下。在项目层面有显着的正向分类匹配证据：具有更好种子或更好需求的研究人员对合作伙伴的研究能力以及项目与合作伙伴选择合作伙伴的能力之间的拟合优度给予更高的价值。选择合作伙伴的项目具有研究能力和拟合优度，与大学和行业研究合作的高绩效相关。此外，自己的联系最常用于正分类匹配。这些结果表明了研究人员的深层领域知识和隐性知识在搜索过程中的重要性。这些发现表明，技术转让政策需要高度重视分散匹配过程的贡献。