The motivations, institutions and organization of university-industry collaborations in the Netherlands

Abstract

This study builds on the economics and organization literatures to explore whether and how institutions and organizational structure complement or substitute each other to create specific spaces of alignment where specific individual actors’ motivations co-exist. Focusing on university-industry collaborations, the study examines whether and how different axes of alignment of university and industry motivations are integrated in projects with specific technological objectives and organizational structures, benefitting from the presence of specific institutions designed to facilitate collaboration. Empirically, the study relies on in-depth data on 30 university-industry collaborations in the Netherlands, and provides preliminary evidence that the technological objective and organizational structure of collaboration are malleable variables allowing the integration of both partners’ objectives and expectations. Different institutional incentives for university-industry collaboration favor specific axes of alignment of motivations and certain types of collaborative projects’ design. Hence, our exploratory results suggest that specific organizational and technological structures tend to prevail in the presence of specific institutions.

University industry links and product innovation: cooperate or contract?

“…By cooperating with universities, firms may not only share the risks and costs associated with basic research, but also build capabilities they would not get by simply contracting out the work to meet their needs. Because of the close interaction during a collaborative agreement, not only the knowledge itself, but also the competencies of the partners can be shared (Bodas-Freitas and Verspagen, 2017;Fey and Birkinshaw, 2005). In this way, cooperation may be a more appropriate strategy to exploit a pool of different but complementary knowledge.…”

The Future of University-Business Cooperation: Research and Practice Priorities

“…Given the importance of such motivations now and in the future, a range of authors have explained motivations for entering into relations with universities (Ankrah et al, 2013;Dan, 2013;Fan et al, 2015;Metcalfe, 2010;Siegel et al, 2003). Nevertheless, our results indicate the continuing need to explore business motivations for UBC in particular (Freitas and Verspagen, 2017;Han and Yim, 2018) and how academics are trained for UBC, indicating a need to better understand academic personnel development in the context of cooperation with other sectors.…”

A Collaborative Governance Approach to Partnerships Addressing Public Problems with Private Data

“…In general, open data initiatives face important challenges and require a variety of economic, political, institutional and operational incentives [6,7,8]. In addition, in industry-academia partnerships firms are motivated to engage with universities for the following reasons [26]: (1) support for product development; (2) access to public research funding; (3) solutions to technological problems; and (4) finding research opportunities. In the context of data collaboratives particularly, incentives for companies to share data with data scientists for the benefit of society include 5Rs: reciprocity; research, recruitment, and insights (benefitting from free data science expertise); reputation and public relations; increasing revenue (when corporate data is offered at a cost) [27].…”