Driving Innovation through Industry-University Research Collaboration
Driving Innovation through Industry-University Research Collaboration
Identifying and supporting conditions which favour business innovation in order to improve competitiveness is a topic of interest to business managers, academics, and public policy makers alike. The perceived importance of innovation for long-run economic growth is such that many governments have introduced new policy targets for research and development expenditure as well as benchmarking indicators of national innovation performance in order to evaluate progress. As such, there is a clear need to understand the relationship between innovation and business performance as well as the internal and external facilitating factors which can contribute to this process.
Broadly speaking, innovation involves the commercial exploitation of new ideas and can be considered in terms of product innovation, process innovation, and organisational innovation. It is not sufficient to merely introduce innovation; the innovation has to produce effective outcomes in at least one of these three areas in order to achieve better business performance. This suggests that maximising opportunities for innovation requires an organisation-wide perspective which harnesses the skills and imagination of employees at all levels to generate and pursue new ideas. This approach can be further extended by cultivating external relationships outside the organisation to access new ideas and opportunities for innovation.
One such area which has received considerable attention concerns collaborative research and development efforts involving businesses and Universities. The encouragement of industry-university partnerships has been one of the key policy instruments used by national and regional governments to stimulate knowledge transfer between pre-competitive research and industrial innovation. The importance of establishing these links was highlighted in an interim report on an ongoing Senate enquiry in Australia which found that only 30% of researchers in Australia work in industry compared to the OECD average of 60% and the United States figure of 80%. Similarly, a report on the role of science, research, and technology in lifting Australian productivity provided by the Australian Council of Learned Academies also made the case for greater collaboration between industry and publically funded research institutions, as well as the need for greater recognition of this form of collaboration in terms of academic career advancement.
Relationships with leading research universities can enhance business legitimacy in the eyes of other powerful stakeholders and provide access to diverse resources, sometimes at prices lower than the going market rates, allowing costs to be reduced and superior performance to be achieved. In this way, industry-university research collaborations can be used to significantly enhance innovation as well as realise genuine business interests which impact the performance of products, processes, or people within the organisation.