Governing and Managing a University-Industry Collaborative R D Program

University-industry R D collaborations (UICs) are becoming more critical for inducing innovation that leads to the creation of new products, services and processes and more broadly, social impact in terms of employment, economic development and public health. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen an unprecedented rise in the number of UICs, and their success has never been more important for society. There are several challenges faced by UICs not least from the cultural differences between universities and industry. UIC programs that involve a large number of individual R D projects bring additional challenges, including the need to define common strategic objectives for the collaborators and to deploy the necessary management skills required for a large multicultural organization. Many of these challenges have been studied in the context of a large UIC program based in Portugal. The UIC involved an investment of 74 million over six years and comprised 44 individual R D projects with over 500 researchers. This paper presents a synopsis of some key challenges and the solutions implemented that can be considered for deployment across other UICs in the future.