Finding the Right Partners: Institutional and personal modes of governance of university-industry interactions

By I. B. Freitas, Aldo Geuna, Federica Rossi. 2013

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study two different governance modes of university–industry interactions: in the institutional mode, interactions are mediated by the university through its administrative structures (such as departments or dedicated units such as technology transfer offices), while in the personal contractual mode interactions involve formal and binding contractual agreements between firms and individual academics, carried out without the direct involvement of the university. We argue that the choice of which form of governance to adopt involves different decision-making processes for firms and that both governance forms have important roles to play in the context of university–industry knowledge transfer. Relying on a representative sample of firms in the Italian region of Piedmont, we examine the characteristics and strategies of firms that interact with universities under different governance modes. Our results indicate that ignoring personal contractual arrangements with individual researchers, as the previous literature does, amounts to overlooking at least 50% of university–industry interactions. The econometric estimations suggest that personal contractual interactions are used relatively more by small firms involved in technology and open innovation strategies, while institutional interactions are mostly used by large firms that vertically integrate R&D activities.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39e4ec6b221d306a1436e903454d02a9db4cb1a2

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurial ecosystem governance: a principal investigator-centered governance framework (2019, background): “In a complex environment as prevalent in entrepreneurial ecosystems, monitoring as well as signaling mechanisms are difficult to establish (Freitas et al. 2013).”
Mapping the field: a bibliometric analysis of the literature on university–industry collaborations (2017, background): “I collaborations garnered interest from scholars by examining different levels of university involvement in relations between firms and individual academics, also considering the mediating role of university administrative structures (Bodas Freitas et al. 2013; Torres et al. 2011).”
Open Innovation 4.0 as an Enhancer of Sustainable Innovation Ecosystems (2020, background): “Multilateral connections appear, in the sense of university–industry–government collaborations, to promote the skilling of the workforce, knowledge diffusion, and sharing with the involvement of the civil society [56].”