Due to the economic globalization, innovation nowadays plays an important role in international competition.
As such, most countries construct or reconstruct the National Innovation System (NIS) in order to enhance the ability of research and development (R&D), and try the best to commercialize the research outcomes. In other words, how to accumulate the “intellectual capital” and let it well tangled with the National Innovation System has been the most important task to most countries. Since most researchers and intellectual properties are held in universities, industrial-academic cooperation becomes a principal mechanism to promote the innovation capacity of a county.
In Taiwan, due to the lack of sophisticated industrial-academic cooperation mechanism, the government is planning to launch the “Industrial Innovation Act” to induce firms’ incentives to cooperate with universities.
Is it necessary to place an exclusive chapter inside the “Industrial Innovation Act” to encourage the industrial-academic cooperation? What are essential problems in Taiwan’s current mechanism? What is the most emergent task to improve the existing system? To answer above questions is the main purpose of this research project.
By examining Taiwan’s industrial-academic cooperation mechanism, we found that mismatching problem stands for the most concerned issue from the firm’s side. Many firms do not know the proper channel to cooperate with universities, especially small and medium enterprises. Therefore, establishing database or substantial matching supports seems to be the priority.
In addition, impediments from the university side seriously retard the cooperation opportunity.
Under current system, professors do no have strong incentives to implement industrial-academic cooperation research plans.
How to modify present rules to make universities and professors involved is on the top of the reform list.
This research project also analyzes the industrial-academic cooperation mechanism of many developed countries, such as the United States, Japan, Germany, Australia and Singapore. The analysis suggests that the government of Taiwan offers relatively sufficient means to encourage industrial-academic cooperation plans by law, however, the executive performance is not as efficient as other developed countries.
This research report not only examines Taiwan’s present industrial-academic cooperation mechanism, but also suggests many methods for improvement, as well as modified terms of existing rules, regulations and acts which are related to the whole mechanism. At the end, several legal items are provided by this report whereas the government tries to adopt an exclusive chapter in the “Industrial Innovation Act” to complete our mechanism.