Four Stages to More Successful Knowledge Transfer between Universities and Industry Entrepreneurs

ABSTRACT This article presents a framework for assessing and managing collaborative relationships between industry entrepreneurial firms and universities. Entrepreneurial decision makers are guided through four stages of successful collaboration including partner assessment and selection, alliance negotiation and governance, alliance management and assessment/termination. The framework will guide the decision maker through the critical stages of a successful collaborative knowledge transfer. INTRODUCTION Collaborating with universities has become an increasingly critical strategy for bringing in complementary capabilities and resources from external sources. Entrepreneurs may find multiple commercialization opportunities regarding university sponsored research. Industries including medical, pharmaceutical, automotive, optics, electronics, aerospace and biotechnology are turning to partnerships with the research university in order to transfer in critical technological knowledge that can ultimately be commercialized and grown into successful enterprises. Why have these relationships been formed? Universities offer extensive access to a wide variety of research expertise and research infrastructure. Industry entrepreneurs offer extensive access to a wide range of expertise in product development/commercialization and market knowledge. Entrepreneurs that can bring the expertise of the university to their business may find significant opportunities to collaborate effectively for innovation, This article focuses on important aspects of how an entrepreneurial executive can manage a successful collaboration with the university to commercialize university research. We propose to aid the knowledge transfer process by detailing a decision framework that can improve the effectiveness of the transfer process in university-industry (UI) collaborations based upon our research and experience with UI collaborations. The framework uses a learning perspective that incorporates the firm's knowledge transfer strategies and an assessment of the tacit-explicit nature of the desired technological knowledge. The framework is structured upon the key decisions that firms make when engaging in the four main stages of technology transfer partnerships. To accomplish our objectives we will first briefly overview research that underlies the framework. Building upon this, we will secondly give important background information regarding the learning paradigm. Third we will describe and analyze the context of the partnering relationship ultimately focusing upon the interface between the university and industry As one technology manager expressed, "The relationships between universities and industry are the critical components to making successful the transfer of knowledge. " Technology managers consistently indicated the importance of pulling together the appropriate "technical/business teams from both sides" to effectively transfer the technology. It is their situation at the transfer interface and their cognitive learning that ultimately will facilitate, or impede, the successful transfer of knowledge. BACKGROUND The University and Industry are typically not competitors, nor are they an integrated system with shared goals. Universities focus on knowledge creation and dissemination. And as one executive noted in interviews "The greatest hurdle that must be overcome in an industry/university relationship is the prevalence in an academic environment to seek knowledge and find answers versus the drive in industry to efficiently bring a new product to market. " Firms focus on the application of knowledge to solve their own and their customer's problems and may engage in knowledge creation or acquisition in order to solve those problems. The industry mission regarding knowledge has traditionally been very pragmatic. Entrepreneurial executives are concerned with employing knowledge to solve immediate problems in order to maximize earnings and stockholder wealth. …