Facilitating university-industry collaboration with a multi-level stakeholder perspective

Abstract

University–industry collaboration has been acknowledged as a vital source of innovation. However, despite its rather long history, a number of barriers to such collaboration remain, and the ways to overcome them have remained unknown. The research field particularly calls for a thorough exploration of the ways to connect the key stakeholders of the Triple Helix (university, industry, government), including the involvement of a fourth stakeholder, the collaboration' intermediary. The university–industry collaboration is a complex collective action, which reflects in the heterogeneous nature of its key stakeholders' goals, knowledge bases, perceptions, culture, and power. Furthermore, this collective action happens across different levels of analysis: from the intra-organisational, through the organisational towards the inter-organisational level and the ‘impact agenda’ calls it to have an influence on the society level. Given the complexity of stakeholders collective actions, the research field has been lacking cross-level links between the related theoretical streams. This doctoral dissertation assists in finding ways to facilitate university–industry collaboration by studying each of the focal stakeholders’ perspectives at the various levels of analysis and contributes to the development of a multi-level stakeholder-based lens. Aiming at a multi-level approach to the diverse stakeholders, the dissertation studies distinct literature streams, which include the stakeholder theory; the entrepreneurial university concept; the knowledge-based and relational views of the firm; the open innovation concept and human capital; innovation intermediation; and the Triple, Quadruple and Quintuple Helixes. Combining a systematic literature review with a survey and multiple case study, this dissertation proposes multiple ways to facilitate university–industry collaboration for each stakeholder across levels of analysis and develops a holistic, multi-level, multi-stakeholder framework, which bridges multiple theoretical streams. In addition to developing the research field, this dissertation provides implications on facilitating university–industry collaboration for university employees, industry representatives and policy makers.