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The management of industry–university joint research projects: how do partners coordinate and control R&D activities?

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Abstract

Benefits derived from industry–university joint research projects (e.g., competitive advantages for firms, opportunities for field experimentation, the funding of academics’ activities and knowledge and technology transfer among partners) are strongly affected by the management system exploited to combine partners’ resources and tasks. Nevertheless, scholars have not paid great attention to management practices of collaborative research, leaving the best practices undefined. Aiming to fill this literature gap, this paper is a first attempt to open the black box of the management of the implementation stage of research and development (R&D) cooperation. The investigation, based on case studies, focuses on how participants of R&D cooperation coordinate and control their activities and what drives the selection of integrating mechanisms. The comparison of coordination and control systems implemented in six industry–university joint research projects highlights that planning and mutual adjustment practices are combined in different ways to manage R&D cooperation. Project and relationship characteristics affect the configuration of the management system. Task uncertainty leads to the decentralization of coordination and control practices, equivocality provides incentives for group coordination mode and reduces the need of informal ongoing monitoring and reciprocal interdependence among partners requires the exploitation of up-to-date project plans.

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Notes

  1. R&D cooperation is here defined as an agreement where two or more economic actors, driven by common innovating goals and organized by hybrid organization mode, share tangible and intangible resources to develop together a research project.

  2. R&D cooperative agreements may be stipulated among organizations that act at different stages of the same supply chain (vertical cooperation), among competitors (horizontal cooperation) or between academic groups and industrial research laboratories (industry–university cooperation). Benefits and risks, and consequently management challenges, vary across different types of cooperation (Nakamura et al. 2003; Tether 2002). Therefore, to collect data on articulated and comparable cases, it is needed to focus the present analysis on only one type of cooperation.

  3. In the context of R&D cooperation, a coordination system is any process that enables appropriate linkages between tasks (Cray 1984) and to orient individual activities toward the aim of the cooperative agreement (Reger 1999), whereas a control system is a supervision process (Reger 1999) that guarantees the execution of inter-organizational plans (Child 1973).

  4. The sequential selection process suggested by Yin (1984) implies that a new case is selected after the conclusions have been drawn from the previous case.

  5. The moderate role of technical specialization’s evaluation in partner selection process of industry–university joint research project is justified by difficulties encountered by firms in the gathering of information about know-hows and competencies of academic groups. For instance, Alpha R&D manager complains that universities do not clearly promote their skills. Social ties and personal relationship allow to overcome this problem by enabling the understanding of “who do what”.

  6. Both participants, but at different moments, are asked to describe coordination and control mechanisms employed to manage the joint research project. In all cases, descriptions provided by partners correspond.

  7. Contracts include clauses that oblige the academic partner not to cooperate with competitors during the development of the joint research project and clauses that provide deadlines for the completion of the work as well as the achievement of the planned outputs before the liquidation of grants by the industrial partner. These clauses prevent opportunities for both of the partners to be victim of moral hazard risks.

  8. This may be a consequence of the voluntary-based selection process of case studies. The interviewed professors prefer to propose only cases where the relationship with the industrial partner remains strong after the conclusion of the R&D cooperation.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge valuable comments from Francesca Sgobbi and from conference participants on previous versions of the material presented to the Technology Transfer Society Annual Conference 2009.

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  1. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Brescia, Via Branze, 38, 25123, Brescia, Italy

    Valentina Morandi

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Morandi, V. The management of industry–university joint research projects: how do partners coordinate and control R&D activities?. J Technol Transf 38, 69–92 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-011-9228-5

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