Abstract
Joint Ph.D. projects are a prominent form of research collaboration, connecting universities to firms and public research organizations. When entering into such collaborations, partners need to make choices regarding a project’s governance. This paper investigates how a university and its partners govern such projects, including decision-making, daily management and disclosure policies. Earlier studies show that shared governance modes have had a higher success rate than centralized governance modes. Nevertheless, more than two thirds of the 191 joint Ph.D. projects we investigated opted for centralized rather than shared governance. Our findings show that: (1) geographical and/or cognitive distance render the adoption of a shared governance mode less likely; (2) the partner controlling critical resources tends to centralize governance, and (3) partnering firms are more likely to put restrictions on publication output than public research organizations. We therefore recommend that universities and their partners take these aspects into account when selecting such projects.
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Notes
Note that our theoretical framework reasons from ‘proximity’, whereas our hypothesis and relevant variables are consistently defined in terms of ‘distance’, being the opposite of proximity.
Departments concern Applied Physics, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Built Environment, Biomedical Engineering, Industrial Design, Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences. The latter four departments where categorized in a single category Management/Design in the regression analysis.
In terms of context, it might be good to explain here that in The Netherlands, Ph.D. candidates typically have an employment contract with the university and receive a regular salary. In that sense, involving them in a collaboration with a firm should probably not be seen a form of exploitation of these individuals.
Here, it is important to stress that in The Netherlands, most of these institutes rely heavily on contract research and other sources of commercial funding, and have very limited public funding, making them quite comparable to firms in many respects. We do realize this situation is notably different in most other countries.
If we assume the response rate for all groups is identical to what we had for Ph.D. candidates (47 %), and that non-response is independent between respondents, then the response rate for complete cases would be .47*.47*.47 = .104 only, which would have left us with only 42 cases. Moreover, it is likely that the identification and response rate among supervisors at both university and partner are lower than those for Ph.D. candidates, which would result in even fewer cases.
It also implied that we could not ask the university supervisor and the university’s partner directly about the levels of trust, which—as we assume—affects the governance mode choice. Neither can one expect the respondent (the Ph.D. candidate) to be able to judge how trustful the relationship was between the collaborating partners. Instead, as explained in the theory section. We derive hypotheses based on the underlying theoretical arguments in the proximity literature.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a research seminar held at Eindhoven University of Technology’s department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences and at a colloquium at Delft University of Technology. We are very grateful for the comments and feedback provided by the participants. This paper also benefited from the valuable comments by three anonymous reviewers. We also thank Delft University of Technology’s Transport and Logistics department for their support and use of their facilities.
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Salimi, N., Bekkers, R. & Frenken, K. Governance mode choice in collaborative Ph.D. projects. J Technol Transf 40, 840–858 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-014-9368-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-014-9368-5
Keywords
- University–industry collaboration
- Collaborative Ph.D. project
- Shared governance
- Centralized governance
- Proximity
- Resource imbalances
- Publication disclosure