How to manage the industry-university collaborative relationship to improve the innovation performance

Based on the context about the industry-university collaboration practice, this paper analyzed a mass of literatures and proposed a theoretical concept of industry-university (IU) collaborative relationship from the perspective of inter-organization relationship management. Through the statistical analysis on the 177 samples of target firms, the paper did an empirical research on how to manage the IU collaborative relationship to improve the innovation performance. This research has three important findings. First, IU collaborative relationship model could explain the mechanism of industry-university collaboration innovation well. Second, the academic engagement relationship plays a leading role in the process of collaboration innovation. Third, ambidextrous relationship model would help the enterprise to get much better innovation performance.