How background, motivation, and the cooperation tie of faculty members affect their university–industry collaboration outputs: an empirical study based on Taiwan higher education environment

University–industry collaboration (UIC) has been booming for several decades worldwide. Integrating knowledge and resources from universities and industries has become a common method to maintain the innovation capacities of the industries. UIC activities have been promoted in Taiwan through various incentive policies for more than 20 years. However, most university faculty members still obtain research resources from government-related organizations much more than from the industries. Thus, this study focuses on the mechanism between faculty inputs and UIC outputs and tries to answer how faculty characteristics, background, motivation, and the collaboration patterns between universities and industries affect the work outputs of university faculty members. The sample consisted of 2031 questionnaires, and 376 traceable questionnaires were deemed valid and were analyzed. The results showed that age, gender, universities, work experience, award records, seniority of the faculty member, and the strength of social ties between the collaborative teams indeed had significant effects on the UIC outputs. The results of this study may be informative for the industries when business organizations are interested in seeking academia partners to achieve their expected collaboration outputs.