Managing a Major University-Industry Collaboration R D Programme

University-industry collaborations (UICs) play an important role in open innovation that can lead to the development of new products, processes and services for society. Industries participate in UICs to expand their knowledge base, share risks on long-term problems, enhance their design thinking skills, and extend their ability to conduct experiments. Universities are attracted to UICs to secure more funding for research, field-test emerging laboratory science and enhance research-led teaching. UICs are increasingly being supported by government funding agencies whose societal aims include enhancing employment, improving workforce skills and expanding industrial growth. There are many challenges facing UICs that arise primarily from bringing together different organisation cultures with dissimilar and often competing expectations. Major UIC programmes that involve a large number of R D projects bring additional challenges including the definition of strategic programme goals and the need for experience and management skills necessary for a large, temporary, multi-cultural organisation. Many of these challenges have been studied within a major UIC programme based in Portugal. The collaboration, presented as a case study in this chapter, involved an investment of 74m over six-years and comprised forty-four individual R D projects with over five-hundred researchers. The research discussed in this chapter presents a number of outcomes from the case study and shares many of the lessons learned and practices that can be adopted in future UIC programmes.