This study empirically identified and investigated the importance and performance of researcher’s competence which serves as crucial stimuli in initiating university-industry collaborative activities in Malaysian research universities using Importance-Performance Matrix Analysis (IPMA). The findings are endorsed by the IPMA that the importance and performance of domain knowledge are high in contributing to sustainability entrepreneurship thus lead to the university-industry collaboration formation. It is also found that social capital and market knowledge are important but the performance of these areas required attention from the management to further enhance. Unexpectedly, it is suggested that the management should pay less attention to researcher reputation as this is the least priority area for improvement as demonstrated by the results generated by the IPMA. Essentially, the findings contribute to the benefit of the university leaders to understand the diversity of competence possessed by the academic researchers as valuable resources in spotting and seizing a business opportunity.
