Best practices for university-industry collaboration

This thesis reports findings from a study of best practices for university-industry collaboration. The study involved over 70 interviews at 17 large technology companies with company managers and individuals having responsibility for the portfolio of industry sponsored projects at universities. A primary finding concerns the role of boundary agents in a company, i.e. individuals that facilitate knowledge transfer across organizational boundaries. Boundary agents are shown to have a strong positive influence on the value of a project and practices are thus described that foster boundary agent activity. For the cases studied, it is also found that longer term collaborations produce results that have more impact on the company and that geographic separation between university researchers and the company has little affect on project outcomes. Three different types of alignment have been found to affect project results and practices relevant to achieving each type are presented. External alignment, the mutual understanding between university researchers and the company of a project's goals and methods, is achieved primarily through regular meetings and selection of a university researcher with an appropriate background.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Calder, Edward Spencer

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Edward Greitzer and William Lucas.

• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38662

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38662