There is a growing interest on the importance of the university-industry linkages and how these relations are shaped on space. In this way, this paper aims to exam the factors that influence the geographical distance of university-industry linkages, with the special concern to the role of the quality of academic research, besides other factors such as local P&D efforts and the local productive structure. To do that, it was built an empirical model that uses data of linkages of academic research groups from the Lattes database from CNPq. The results show that the quality of academic research is positively correlated to the geographical distance, which means that higher performance research groups tend to link to distant firms. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that lower performance universities are less important, since they can meet the demand of local firm and they can collaborate with their innovative efforts.
university-industry linkages; geographical proximity; quality of academic research; policy
