INFLUENCE OF UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION ON FIRMS' PERFORMANCE: COMPARISON BETWEEN CZECH AND SLOVAK INDUSTRIES

In the period of global economy, companies are increasingly forced to seek new sources of competitive advantage that will help them succeed in the marketplace. Companies can increase their performance and gradually help to increase the performance of economies by using a variety of sources. Innovations are presented as one of the most important sources of competitive advantage by number of studies. Innovations do not arise independently, but they are created through interactions based on knowledge transfers (most commonly in the form of cooperation or partnership). Firms decide individually with which partners they will cooperate. Competitors, suppliers, customers, universities and research organizations are among the most frequently mentioned partners. Universities represent one of the primary sources in the process of new knowledge and innovations creation. However, countries and companies cooperate with them differently and with a different intensity. Companies represent the private sector where profit is seen as one of the main objectives while universities are representative of the public sector (in most cases). The aim of this paper is to analyse the situation of Czech and Slovak companies in manufacturing industry and perform an initial comparison between these countries. Subsequently, we analyse: (i) how cooperation with universities and public research centres influences innovative activities and the overall performance of companies in manufacturing industry; (ii) efficiency of public funds provision at the level of university-industry-government partnership. We confirm the results of several international studies which demonstrated that this type of partnership and cooperation can be significantly inefficient. On the other hand, we show that the proper provision of public subsidies and the proper emphasis on cooperation partners lead to significant results that positively affect firms' performance. For the analysis, own multiple linear regression models are created by using data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), which was realized by Eurostat.