An analytical approach to assess the matching quality of academic partners for open innovation in the form of university collaboration.

Abstract

Since innovating in-house with limited resources and capabilities in a fierce competition becomes harder to achieve, open innovation becomes an alternative strategy with the notion of the exploration and exploitation of technology outside the firm's boundary. Open innovation concept receives much attention among scholars and practitioners. The effectiveness of open innovation adoption relies on external partners who play as either the complement technology contributor or the unused technology utilizer or both. While firms have multiple choices of partnering firms with heterogeneity in types and profiles, some work with academia in the form of university-industry collaboration (UIC) since faculty researchers are capable of producing and advancing science knowledge which advantages the firms' innovation development missions. However, much empirical research and case studies reveal that some collaborations encounter failures in performances, usmooth interactions or other difficulties which are caused by various gaps in characteristics between industries and academia e.g. gaps in common knowledge base, gaps in agreements on intellectual property management policy, or gaps in organizational culture etc. Moreover, some managers adopt UIC under an open innovation strategy without standardization and researchers have addressed the demand of systematization in practice as the research agenda. This dissertation captures the demand of systematic practice and regards the identification of the appropriateness of academic partners as the essential mission for the development of effective collaboration. The recognitions of how well academic partners match with the firm and what are gaps between two parties help firms to avoid the risks of collaboration and guide them the initiatives of solutions. Hence, this dissertation proposes an analytical approach for assessing the matching quality of academic partners who engage in UICs. With an exploratory research design, this dissertation employed a qualitative method through a series of interviews and a comprehensive review of literature. Theoretical frameworks were connected to the business cases in order to obtain the specific criteria set and to construct the matching quality assessment model. The assessment model produces both numeric results and three graphical feedbacks of I.) the complementarity vs. compatibility matrix 2.) the matching quality radar chart and 3.) the matching quality gap bar chart. The first one presents the comparative outlook of the matching quality among all candidates. The second one visualizes the matching quality gaps of each candidate. And the third one prioritizes the matching quality gaps. These three graphical feedbacks function as the practical guidance for the smooth collaboration. The validity of proposed approach was verified by experts and extant literature and the usability was tested with the past UIC project between a large petrochemical firm and its candidate university partners. As the major outcome of this research, the proposed approach for assessing the matching quality of partners is practical for any firms who adopt an open innovation concept.