University Science Parks as an Innovative Tool for University- Business Cooperation Klaudia Glittová and Miroslav Šipikal University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovak Republic klaudia.glittova@euba.sk miroslav.sipikal@euba.sk Abstract: Collaboration between universities, business and government is important in creating innovation, but often they face barriers which block the successful cooperation among institutional spheres. To improve and strengthen collaboration and overcome existing barriers were created hybrid organizations (like university science parks, research centres or incubators) to address innovation blockages. With the growing popularity of this tool among regional policy makers, there is a need to specify their roles and functions in regional innovation systems. The main goal of our paper is to examine the contribution of university science parks and research centres in Slovakia, which were built thanks to financial support from European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF). University science parks (USPs) and research centres (RCs) are tools for connecting the university, industry and government sector in a Triple helix framework. They create a suitable space for generating innovation with existing resources at universities, research institutes, research departments of companies and governments, and improve them through mutual interactions. We applied the method of quantitative research – an online questionnaire survey complemented with interviews, which we used to collect basic data on all science parks in Slovakia. The key question in the article is whether research infrastructures represent effective investment with long-term sustainability. We evaluated the current functioning of the parks in terms of fulfilling the functions that contribute to innovation creation, because quality and modern infrastructure is a prerequisite for the implementation of research, the results of which have a high development and innovation potential. We found that the research infrastructure doesn’t perform the required functions, which were declared during their creation. The main barriers to development include insufficient funding for research, technological infrastructure and long-term financing of professional staff. Unclear conditions for the continued operation of parks and uncertain position of government support shows that these investment projects financed by the European Funds are not independently viable after the end of the sustainability period. Keywords: innovation, university science parks, cooperation, enterprises 1. Introduction The competitiveness of countries and regions in sustainable growth is based on innovation and technology which depends to a large extent on the ability to create an attractive infrastructure environment that supports interactions between universities and industry (Battelle, 2007). The activities of universities have increased significantly, the main changes can be observed in joint activities with companies such as research projects, contract research and activities to support innovative entrepreneurship. Universities thus help to establish companies through their university incubators or science and technology parks (Blažek and Uhlíř, 2011). The level of technical infrastructure has qualified by human resources, a basic condition for the quality of research activities. According to several international statistics (such as European Innovation Scoreboard or Community Innovation Survey by EU), Slovakia has been long-term on the last stages of the EU countries in terms of comparative evaluations of research and innovation results. The Triple helix model points to the increasing and necessary overlap of activities between universities, government and the private sector. There are many barriers that block successful overlapping activities and mutual cooperation between actors. Within the Triple helix model, it is possible to create independent hybrid organizations at the intersection of overlapping activities, which can be one of the solutions to innovation blockades (Champenois and Etzkowitz, 2018). Observing European research and development trends, we see that focusing on creating European Research Area and intensifying the research base is an increasing priority. Success in European research means a high concentration of human and financial resources, strong background need to connect specialized workplaces with a focus on interdisciplinary research (Brzica et al., 2014). University science parks (USPs) and research centres (RCs) are one of the hybrid organization tools for connecting the academic and private sectors (Champenois and Etzkowitz, 2018). Over the past two decades, USPs been a continued source of interest for academics and policy makers due to their potential to aid innovation (Messina et al. 2022; Nieth and Benneworth, 2020). They create a suitable space for creating innovation using existing resources 648 Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, ECIE 2022