The theoretical framework of university-to-industry knowledge transfer

Co-operations and collaborations between universities and industries (UI) are proliferating in China and all over the world. But there are many differences between university and industry and obstacles when transferring knowledge from university to firm: different objectives, different nature of the work and products, different culture, etc. This paper focuses on knowledge transfer from universities to industry. Through literature research, this paper concludes the five factors which influence university-to-industry effective knowledge transfer, and accordingly establishes the theoretical framework. These five factors are university knowledge transferor factors, university and industry interaction, firm knowledge absorptive factors, knowledge characteristics and culture distance. According to the model, this paper proposes the 11 hypotheses.