Effectiveness of a university-industry matching program at creating collaborative research

To realize technological innovation based on advanced university technologies, it is important to establish collaborative research projects between universities and industry in the early stages of R&D. One way to stimulate the creation of university-industry collaborative research is to have a systematical coordinating mechanism between a university and industry. We analyzed the effectiveness of a university-industry coordination program at creating university-industry collaborative research projects. We used data from the matching program called Proprius21 at the University of Tokyo and found out that the matching program has increased collaborative studies at the University of Tokyo. We also analyzed the R&D characteristics of various firms using the relation between the firm's R&D intensity and the range of firm's R&D areas. The matching program is especially effective for large companies in ICT-related fields, although it is not so effective for efforts involving life science technologies, which are overall the most active area for university-industry collaboration. Results show that the matching program is most effective for creating collaborative studies with technology-oriented firms engaged in various business domains.