Extending community management to industry‐university‐government organizations

Abstract

There has been an emergence of collaborative research networks of industry‐university‐government relationships, or so‐called Triple Helix (TH) organizations. Many TH organizations strive for research and innovation community management. In the innovation and knowledge management literature, community management offers open, participatory, and distributed innovation processes. How community management elements manifest, how they evolve, and what are related contingencies remain poorly understood, especially in the case of TH organizations. Our study examines how two TH organizations in Finland have adopted community management elements, how these elements have evolved, and the contingencies that have affected adoption and evolution. We report on the first 6 years of operations in two different TH organizations. Community‐management elements have accommodated divergent interests in TH organizations, but they have also been subject to considerable degrees of conflict and tension. We extend the innovation community management literature by explicating community management elements in a TH context, we illustrate how TH organizations adopt and evolve these elements, and we identify two contingencies for community management elements in a TH context.