University–industry interaction and firms’ innovation performance: new evidence from the biopharmaceutical industry

This study examines the impact of university-industry (U-I) interaction on firms’ innovation performance in the biopharmaceutical industry, focusing on understanding the temporal relationship between co-publishing and innovation. Using a sample of Italian biopharmaceutical firms from 2000 to 2010, we explore whether collaborative research, specifically co-publishing between public and private research entities, influences firms’ likelihood of innovation and the intensity of their innovation activities. Our investigation sheds light on the temporal aspects of the knowledge generation process and its implications for firms’ innovation endeavours. It reveals an “anticipatory effect” of co-publishing on innovation outcomes. Our findings, corroborated by a set of robustness checks, detect that the influence of collaboration on innovation activities precedes the appearance of a joint publication, ruling out the hypothesis of “defensive publication” as a complementary part of a firm’s overall IP protection strategy pursued by biopharmaceutical firms.