Historically, our understanding of University Business Collaborations (UBC) is based on the role of barriers in the development of cooperation. During the June 2017 University Industry Innovation Network (UIIN) annual meeting, various participants discussed strategies and practices to manage and overcome barriers to support successful UBC. One assumption is that once barriers are overcome, the road is paved for collaborations. This assumption by questioning the barrier’s significance in UBC is discussed below.
Are barriers the main influencing factor in the process of establishment of a UBC? Through the “State of European University-Business Cooperation” study in 2011, it was demonstrated that barriers and obstacles do not play a significant role in UBC. This means that the actors involved would still engage in university-business activities regardless of the existence of barriers. The latest results of the UBC study 2016/17 reinforce these findings. This study concluded that focusing on barriers is a factual error. Contrary to the current beliefs, we show that influencing drivers, such as motivation and benefits, can stimulate UBC activities to the point in which the impact of barriers to UBC lacks explanatory power. Thus, drivers rather than barriers determine the extent of UBC activities.
The impact of UBC drivers is considered to be influential enough to compensate for barriers and obstacles during university-business cooperation. Consequently, strong drivers are far more important when launching and managing UBC than strategies to remove or overcome barriers.
Thus, organizations should base their strategies on drivers rather than barriers. UIIN identified in its latest UBC study that the most relevant drivers are different for managers and academics. Higher education managers see obtaining financial resources as the main driver for UBC, whereas academics value the possibility to gain new insights for research and to improve graduate employability. Further, European higher education institutions stated the contribution to university mission, addressing societal challenges and issues, as well as using research knowledge in practice as motivation to engage in university-business cooperation.
The biggest motivation for European businesses is the access to new technologies and knowledge. Improving innovation capacity and accessing discoveries in the first stage of their lifecycle were rated as second and third most relevant motivators for European businesses to enter collaborations.
Thus, a smart institution should focus on the external motivating factors if they are looking to leverage their UBC practice. Likewise, a business needs to understand the misalignment of drivers in an institution for higher education. While this is very simplistic to state, it is very complicated to achieve in an institution for higher education.
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