Although calls are made by governments, university management, and industry to increase university–industry interaction, such calls conflict with the incentives in performance-based research funding systems that encourage publications in the Thomson ISI Web of science. In this paper, we explore interaction between the university and industry from the individual university researchers’ perspective. We find that the current system privileges research publications and, in line with the literature, that the time spent writing competes with the time spent on collaboration and teaching. We also find a difference between disciplines: the competition between these activities appears to be greater in the social sciences than in applied subjects such as technology and health care. A recommendation for improving university–industry interaction is that the value of such interaction be recognized in the university’s incentive system. In addition, including in the incentive system a broader span of research-based publications aimed at different target groups could be a way to support university–industry interaction.