The Roles of Research at Universities and Public Labs in Innovation Systems: a Perspective from the Italian Food and Drink industry

The objective of the paper is to determine the role that R&D networking, through the collaboration of firms with universities, plays among the determinants of product and process innovation in the Italian food and drink industry and how geographical proximity to a university affects both R&D university-industry collaboration and innovation. The data are sourced from the 7th (1995-1997), 8th (1998-2000), 9th (2001-2003) and 10th (2004- 2006) waves of Capitalia survey. The approach is a trivarate probit analysis in which the dependent variables are R&D collaboration with a university, process and product innovation; the independent variables are firm, territorial and university characteristics.