Assessing the relationship between organizational communication and university-industry collaboration: a quantitative examination of university strategic plans

Abstract

University-industry collaboration has become an increasingly important component of universities’ missions as institutions face growing expectations to demonstrate measurable returns on public investment and contribute to regional and national competitiveness (Boyer, 1996; Kellogg Commission, 1999; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). At the same time, rising financial pressures have encouraged universities to diversify revenue streams and strengthen partnerships with the private sector in order to remain relevant to key stakeholders and sustain their research and educational enterprises. Prior research on university-industry collaboration has largely focused on structural and organizational conditions of universities, such as research capacity, disciplinary orientation, and institutional resources (Perkmann et al., 2013; Rybnicek & Königsgruber, 2018; Ankrah & AL-Tabbaa, 2015). Comparatively little empirical work has examined how universities communicate institutional priorities related to industry engagement and whether those communications shape patterns of collaboration activity. Building on the University-Business Collaboration Ecosystem Framework (Galán-Muros & Davey, 2017), this dissertation examines whether organizational communication about university-industry collaboration moderates the relationship between organizational conditions and industry-sponsored research activity among R1 and R2 universities in the United States. Drawing on perspectives from constitutive approaches in organizational communication theory, the study treats university strategic plans as artifacts through which institutions communicatively create and ultimately articulate priorities, frame organizational identity, and signal commitment to external engagement. A total of 303 strategic plans were collected and analyzed using text-mining techniques to measure the prevalence and institutionalization of communication related to university-industry collaboration. Organizational communication supporting university-industry collaboration was then operationalized through a composite measure combining normalized frequencies of relevant language, the average maturity score derived from automated rubric-based classification of industry-related passages, and the temporal relevance of the strategic plan. Ordinary least squares regression models were used to examine the relationships between organizational conditions and industry-sponsored research, and moderation analyses were conducted to assess whether organizational communication conditioned these relationships. Results indicate that several organizational conditions were significantly associated with industry-sponsored research activity, consistent with prior literature on university-industry collaboration (Perkmann et al., 2013; Ankrah & AL-Tabbaa, 2015; Boardman & Ponomariov, 2009). Organizational communication supporting collaboration was also positively associated with industry-sponsored research. However, the moderation analyses generally did not provide evidence that organizational communication significantly altered the relationships between organizational conditions and collaboration outcomes. These findings suggest that while institutional communication may signal priorities related to industry engagement, structural characteristics of universities remain the primary drivers of industry-sponsored research activity. This study contributes to research on university-industry collaboration by introducing a novel approach for measuring institutional communication using strategic plan text and by empirically examining the role of organizational communication within a large cross-institutional sample. The findings highlight the continued importance of structural institutional factors while suggesting that strategic plans may be an imperfect proxy for organizational communication about industry collaboration and that communication alone, without corresponding structural capacity or institutional commitment, does not substantially influence collaboration outcomes.