Collaborative R&D projects: a best practice management model

The sharing of information and expertise has been shown to enhance innovation. Therefore, against a background of increasing international competition and rapid technological change, there is an increasing trend toward collaboration between companies, and between universities and industry. However, collaborations are difficult to manage and often fail. Studies of inter-organisational collaborations identified management factors that increase the probability that a collaboration will be successful. Equivalent studies of university-industry collaborations have concentrated on the "cultural gap" between academia and industry. This research demonstrates that these inter-organisational success factors apply across types of collaboration and across industries, and that their influence extends beyond inter-organisational R&D partnerships to university-industry collaborations. The result of this work is a generic best practice model for the effective management of technological collaborations.