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The US government has decidedly moved towards encouraging co-operation in research and development (R&D) between firms, universities, and other research institutes since the early 1980s. The Republican Administration in the early 1980s set the stage for a radical shift in market environment affecting business strategy and behaviour, including the undertaking of co-operative R&D, by introducing extensive changes in antitrust and intellectual property rights law and enforcement. These changes weakened competition policy and significantly strengthened IPR protection. Moreover, a series of legislative actions created the legal framework for promoting industry-university-government co-operation in science and technology and for allowing industry and universities to benefit financially from the results of research funded by the federal government The Democratic Administrations in the 1990s further built on this system, largely by pushing forward a series of Programmes actively promoting government-industry-university partnerships and trying to "channel" private sector R&D activity in technological areas with potentially widespread economic returns. While many of the specific S&T programmes have since been scaled down by Congress, the general policy orientation towards closer collaboration between industry, universities, and government has remained intact.

Inter-firm strategic alliances deserve a much more prominent place in the public debate on industrial restructuring and economic growth than they have enjoyed until now. Alliances provide a useful mechanism to assist the establishment of competitive indigenous IT industries and to mobilise the necessary financial resources and technological expertise needed to upgrade lagging infrastructure. Alliances, however, are only one of many potential policy instruments. In order to be successful in their role as facilitators of access to technology, capital and markets, alliances must be complemented by an appropriate domestic economic environment. Ultimately, this environment will affect the incentives of firms to upgrade to higher value-added activities and to seek out appropriate collaborators. Certain policy 'complications' that alliances introduce also deserve serious consideration.

PurposeUniversities have become both increasingly entrepreneurial and international over the past few decades. We still, however, know little about the relationship between the two trends. This paper investigates the effect of international exposure of university faculty members on university entrepreneurial culture.Design/methodology/approachUsing a specially constructed dataset of the entrepreneurial activities of 507 computer science faculty members—among whom 138 are returnees—from 21 research-intensive universities in China during 2007–2017, the study empirically investigates the relationship between foreign experience and academic entrepreneurial activity back home. We control for characteristics of the faculty member and the location of the university.FindingsAcademic tenure overseas is found to positively affect academic entrepreneurship. The length of stay abroad also affects the relationship: returnee academics with foreign Ph.D. degrees are more likely to start new businesses than returnee academics with shorter postdoc experience overseas. The economic gap between the host (foreign) and home country (China) does not have a statistically significant effect on returnee academic entrepreneurial activity.Originality/valueTo the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically investigate returnee academic entrepreneurship. It provides indications on how foreign educational background affects academics entrepreneurial activities.