Inovação aberta entre universidade-empresa: a percepção de professores universitários

Abstract

Universities, through their academic research, began to act not only in the generation of knowledge, as teaching and research institutions, but also in the diffusion of this knowledge, being important agents within the perspective of open innovation. In this scope, the companies are the main agents of cooperation with universities, demonstrating the importance of studying university-company interaction. However, given that the interaction between the university and the companies has received little attention in the literature on Open Innovation, the present research aims to propose a set of factors to characterize the profile of university teachers groups regarding the interaction for open innovation between universities and companies. The research was characterized by a quantitative nature and used factor analysis and cluster analysis to analyze the responses collected through an online questionnaire. The questionnaire, developed from a theoretical model built from the literature, had 43 variables, being 13 referring to motivations, 13 about barriers and 17 about the means for cooperation between universitycompany. The questionnaire was sent to the e-mails of all professors at the federal universities in Minas Gerais, these being the subjects of analysis, collected on the university websites, and obtained a total of 499 responses, 408 of which were considered valid. Through the factor analysis it was possible to define and validate a set of factors used to characterize, later, the central characteristics of each group, where nine factors were extracted. The cluster analysis was developed with the purpose of identifying groups of professors within the universities regarding the practices of open innovation between university and company, where 2 clusters were identified. Generally, the results show that university professors who have a higher degree of qualification have more perspective regarding the aspects related to the interaction for open innovation between universities and companies.