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Top1. Introduction
Universities have a crucial role in society as producers and transmitters of knowledge (D'Este & Patel, 2007). However, they must go beyond training and research (OECD, 2007) and gain a leading role in regional development and economic growth as their third mission (Secundo et al., 2017). In order to achieve their third mission, universities must exercise an active role in building bridges with industry (Benneworth & Nieth, 2019; Lambert, 2003), aiming to establish collaborative relationships, i.e., achieve effective and efficient interaction between any part of the higher education system and its socioeconomic environment, and thus fostering knowledge and technology exchange (Ankrah & Al-Tabbaa, 2015; Gould Bei, 2002). These interactions are called University-Industry Linkage (uil).
The uil has experienced a significant increase in recent decades in university agendas (Hillerbrand & Werker, 2019; Sarabia-Altamirano, 2016), due to the need for universities to increase industry-driven research proposals (Philbin, 2008). The economic benefit of the uil is vital, because through these relationships, industries can solve technological problems in products and processes, access to knowledge and trained human capital and gain a competitive advantage that allows them to grow, while universities obtain funding so they can develop new knowledge and technology (Becerra & Dutrénit, 2016; Lee, 2011; Omeife & Horan, 2019). In addition, universities try to improve the employability of their graduates, mainly in local small and medium-sized enterprises (smes), via internships and joint projects between students and the industry (Ishengoma & Vaaland, 2016).
Even though there is a diversity of organizational systems or mechanisms for the uil (Ankrah & Al-Tabbaa 2015), these can be classified into five groups: meetings and conferences, consulting and research, creation of infrastructure (incubators, laboratories, research centers, university spin-offs), training (student placements, employee training) and joint research (D'Este & Patel, 2007). However, regardless of the selected uil mechanism, the latter constitutes a set of complex actions that take place between the two institutions (Arvizu Narváez & Arvizu Narváez, 2014) and there is often a significant overlap between the activities of universities and industry (Hillerbrand & Werker, 2019). Nowadays, there are several reasons why uil collaborations succeed or fail, and this is due mainly to the complexity of the collaboration process (Philbin, 2008).
Among the factors that drive and strengthen the uil, the following are considered: