How businesses should govern knowledge-intensive collaborations with universities: An empirical investigation of university professors

Abstract

In light of the high relevance of universities as sources of knowledge, university-business collaboration (UBC) offers significant opportunities for businesses with respect to making use of external academic research and innovation support. Unlike knowledge-intensive collaboration with other businesses, UBC has particularities which need to be considered, notably the role of professors as individual decision makers. Additionally, to assign intellectual property rights to knowledge and to reduce the danger of opportunistic behavior, mutually beneficial UBC requires adequate governance mechanisms. As previous research has not investigated the effects of governance mechanisms on knowledge sharing (knowledge combination, learning, and co-poiesis) and the achievement of joint goals in UBC, our empirical study covering 415 German professors examines these relations. We find a positive influence of relational governance and a negative influence of transactional governance on knowledge sharing in UBC. Regarding the influence of knowledge sharing on the achievement of joint goals, we find positive impacts of knowledge combination and co-poiesis and a negative impact of learning on the achievement of joint goals.