The role of Open Innovation and University-Industry Collaboration in the Pandemic- driven Changes in Businesses

This research aims at exploring the relationship between open innovation and university-collaboration (UIC) in promoting a growth in firm performance (turnover). As the covid-19 is a public health emergency and hit very hard on the world economies, conducting firms to deep downturns due to drastic change in socioeconomic life of people. We analyse the direct effect of inbound open innovation as well university-industry absolute number of contacts on turnover growth, as a cluster for the financial recovery of companies. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 878 Portuguese companies that previous respond to an open innovation survey and conducting a multi-nominal regression. The results show the moderating effects of inbound, UIC through contacts and hiring graduates’ employees.