The aim of this article is to analyse the impact of academic capacity building onuniversity-industry-linkages (UILs) and to identify a set of critical success factors to guide improvements of university-industry knowledge transfers in developing countries.Extensive empirical evidence from a unique case of academic institution building and efforts to improve UILs in the context of a developing country - the Thai Higher Education Development Project (HEDP) - isused. Since the Thai HEDP combines the enhancement of both core academic missionsand UIL activities within newly founded centres, it provides an interesting case study to support the cross-fertilization of ideas and academic entrepreneurship. The article is organised as follows: (i) A generic overview of UILs in Thailand is presented to place the establishment and evolution of the centres into perspective; (ii) The quantitative relevance of UILs at the centres is measured and considered by looking at their sources of incomegeneration; (iii) Approaches and best practices of the centres towards UILs are discussed with the help of qualitative analysis;(iv) The empirical results are used to identify critical success factors for UILs, and their potential for cross-fertilisation of academic tasks in developing countries. © 2009 SAGE Publications.