Barriers to Collaborating Activities among Policy Actors in Industry-Academia Collaboration Policies

Abstract

This paper explores barriers to collaboration among policy actors in the policy delivery system, focusing on industry-academia collaboration (IAC) policies in South Korea. At first, this paper shows that since individual actors in firms and universities are used to operating within the different organizational contexts of the norms, goals, and values that shape their practices, the individual actors exhibit different behaviors in collaboration. The individuals tend to fit their behaviors to their organizational context rather than to a policy context. In addition, the policy delivery system of the programs is characterized by a university-oriented mode in which universities exercise considerable power. Thus, in many cases, firms do not have legitimate roles in operating the programs. Due to these problems, in the IAC programs, many barriers to collaboration between policy actors with different organizational cultures occur.