Firms’ disclosure of university ties on their website: An explorative analysis of its role for innovation performance

This paper explores a novel web-based indicator to examine how firms’ disclosure of university ties on their websites shapes their innovation performance. First, using data from the German Community Innovation Survey 2023 and the Tenders Electronic Daily database, combined with firms’ discloser of university ties on their website provided by ISTARI.AI, we investigate the indicator’s properties by comparing the most frequently disclosed types of university ties: innovation collaborations, university customers, and employee education, with firms’ survey responses and their procurement contracts. Second, we analyze how website disclosure of university ties relates to firms’ revenues from new or significantly improved products or services, applying Ordinary Least Squares, a Control Function, and Lewbel Instrumental Variable approach. In sum, the website disclosure of ties with universities is significantly associated with its related survey items and procurement contracts. Moreover, website disclosures show no consistent association with revenues from innovations new-to-the-firm. A consistent statistically significant relationship emerges only for small firms, where website disclosures are associated with higher revenues from market novelties. These findings suggest that our web-based indicator captures ties between firms and universities and that disclosing these ties on firms’ websites may influence the market success of their novel products. • We identify firms’ website mentions of universities, showing their potential as a granular, scalable indicator of firms’ different ties with universities. • Disclosed ties largely track firms’ actual engagement, but are used only by a small set of engaged firms. • Website mentions of university ties are conceptualized as low-cost, customer-facing signals. • There is no association between website disclosures and innovation revenues in general. • For small firms, website disclosures are positively associated with market-novelty revenues.