Today, such university relationships are indeed considered as ‘collaboration’, either according to the University-Business/Industry (UBC) models or more generally the Triple Helix of university-business-government (Etzkowitz
2008). Currently, at the European level, the institutional analysis framework dominates the UBC analysis. It is grounded on the structures of the higher education systems, business organizations, and governmental base; the latter is described as the ‘Action level’ that drives the ‘Factor level,’ which then leads to the ‘Result level’ (cf. Davey et al.
2013a,
b). Single actors, agents, and bottom-up developments do not have a strong role and position in these models.
Applying the ecosystem model to the university-business-government collaboration entity requires the knowledge of the vital forces that actually feed the emergence of such ecosystems and exist on the underlying platforms (cf. Cusumano and Gawer
2002). These forces can be economic, technological, social, policy-related, academic, cultural, and psychological in nature, but they require a functional platform, coupled with the ecosystem. Hence, the recognition of the relevant ecosystem platforms is especially valuable when choosing supporting policies concerning any ecosystem.
In the following, the term ‘university-business-government collaboration (UXC)’ is used to denote many of the university collaboration forms and sectors related to the industry, business, or government partners. For example, it may refer to research collaboration where the partners come from large university institutes and governmental offices with shared interests, or it can be a small university-based research team (fewer than ten researchers) working closely with a business unit of a private firm and sharing their specific research and development (R&D) goals. The collaboration itself can concern either single firms or their business units, specific sectors of industry, ministries, public offices, or business activities within a global business partner network. Only when relevant, a university-business (industry) collaboration is here denoted by ‘UBC’.
There is accumulating evidence on successful industrial, technological, social, and service platforms (e.g., Amazon, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, SAP). Although run by these well-known firms, the platforms have grown to cover a spectrum of services and customers, often outside the original business area of the company (e.g., Amazon Cloud). The platform concept, as defined by Cusumano and Gawer (
2002), includes general elements that offer inspiration for the analysis of modern UXC platforms. For example, there are at least five relevant concepts: (i)
the scope and extent of internal/external innovation work, (ii)
the openness of the technology and other architectural elements underlying the innovation activities, (iii) the nature of
interaction and complementary collaboration, (iv)
relationships with external parties, and (v)
the structure of internal organization and its alignment according to the platform strategy.
The concept of platform can be either wide or narrow, but typically, it does not refer to a closed system, or to a technology, organizational structure, or a function alone. In consumer businesses, for example, a platform can include social, cultural, and even political elements as has been demonstrated by the social media applications corresponding to Facebook, but used in China and Russia. Many of the platform elements are intimately connected with the ecosystems, and indeed, they can be seen as the necessary sources of ecosystem growth.
Here, the UXC platform concept is introduced to reframe the university-business-government relationships and identify its behavioral requirements. It is a bottom-up, practice-oriented complement to the institutional models, with the aim to help universities enter UXC platforms and speed up this development. The approach is somewhat similar to the entrepreneurial analysis of national innovation systems; the national perspective is described by Ács et al. (
2014) using the framework of National Systems of Entrepreneurships (NSoE). They note: ‘NSoEs…are fundamentally resource allocation systems that are driven by individual-level opportunity pursuit, through the creation of new ventures, with this activity and its outcomes regulated by country-specific institutional characteristics’. In other words, they not only emphasize the role of
individual-level pursuit and the individual ability to create new ventures but they also look at institutional obstacles of NSoE, having influence on venture pursuing individuals. The individual is considered as an entrepreneurial actor, constrained by institutional regulations and other environmental factors controlling entrepreneurial behaviors (see also e.g., Lundvall (
1992) and Nelson (
1993) on the national innovation systems analysis).
The role and function of an individual actor in the modern UXC environment has become ambiguous. Traditionally, academics have been motivated by the ethos and culture of the scientific endeavor, but today, they are subject to the economic and competitive factors that constrain all forms of science including basic research. The question now arises of how to provide opportunities for academically motivated people to work in the UXC contexts, different from the traditional basic research environments and how to do this without sacrificing what is best in the academic ethos and value system.
The UXC platform can be considered as a functional base where individuals (university researchers and students with their collaborating partners) are encouraged to behave according to the UXC requirements and the academic values. Such platforms already exist, but they should be recognized. They emerge as a result of technological, economic, social-individual, and/or cultural and even regional factors, tightly coupled as different configurations constituting the de facto growth factors where profitable and productive UXC interaction is possible. If successful as systems, the platforms can feed a true ecosystem emergence (cf. Gawer and Cusumano
2008). However, the situation is complex for the current collaborating parties who are guided by the historical institutional regulations, emerging new policies, the largely varying values, and incentives of different and sometimes even conflicting partnering organizations in the UXC.
A successful platform, which can also exist without explicit support from the institutional university regulations, is an invitation to partners from any segment of the society, including other universities, to join, but it cannot happen without a consensus and shared goals of the participants in adapting to the platform. An excellent example of the emerging Open-X activities is the development of Linux. In this case, Linus Thorvalds studied and worked at the University of Helsinki in the early 1990s and collaborated with the ‘open’ operating system development community, independent of the locations and institutional boundaries of its members (cf. Raymond
1999).
However, not all examples of Open-X activities are so strong. Typical examples of weak platforms in the UXC context are the institutionally driven, once-only or time-limited and program-driven research and service purchases by firms, ministries, or other organizations, which are conducted without a deeper, process-related, continued, or other entanglement of the UXC parties. While there is no explicit data on this, only practical experiences, there are good grounds to assume that this has happened in many of the EU calls where temporary research coalitions were formed, but they have not led to long-term collaboration platforms or ecosystems.
Who could take the lead? The general business trend is towards distributed, richly subcontracted and networked production and management. Straightforward, top-down control of UXC is becoming increasingly difficult and actually inefficient in this environment. Hence, involving the future generation of policymakers - the students - and academic management early at universities could itself be a means to facilitate the future university-society partnership culture and its institutional forms. However, the basic research-only governance system that does not prepare students for future academic positions with a UXC remit is a significant hindrance to this transformation. Early study alternatives, internships in firms, dynamic career alternatives, and other means could be considered as an effective solution if they were incentivized. Accordingly, Etzkowitz et al. (
2012) have recently suggested a model,
Novum Trivium, integrating education, innovation, and research in undergraduate studies, consisting of the components of academic specialization, innovation, and entrepreneurship studies and language and culture studies. They also list a number of examples from universities in Europe, US, UK, and South America, where some elements of this approach occur. Some best practices can also be found as described in the documents of University-Business Forum
a.
Changing business landscapes and UXC
Universities need to be aware of the ongoing renewal of the collaboration forms and models in businesses (cf. Samuel
2014): what is now called ‘collaboration’ is increasingly becoming knowledge sharing, partnering in ecosystems, and dynamic value-creating networking (Peltonen et al.
2013). This has already introduced new kinds of partnerships and public-private ventures, creating shared value by responding to human needs and social problems (Porter and Kramer
2011) and looking for business model innovations. Business giants like Intel, Wells Fargo, and General Electric have already launched services and business with such a motivation. WaterHealth
b International is another more specific example of a growing firm working on water purification business to offer pure water with minimum cost for people in poor countries. Universities could and should have a critical, new role, founded on academic values in making the two aims meet: advancing economically profitable businesses and promoting their beneficial societal impacts.
SMEs are known to have a significant national impact on growth, but most SMEs cannot afford the risky costs and bureaucracy of the traditional university collaboration. Furthermore, they do not have extensive experience in dealing with such activities and SME networks for university collaboration do not exist in abundance
c. In the UK, for example, the university funding from SME collaboration in 2012 was about 1/6th of the investment in higher education relationships by the public sector, charities, and social enterprises (Docherty
2013).
As an example of their potential, SMEs in the US produce 13 times more patents per employee than large companies do and innovations in small firms are twice as closely connected with scientific research as they are in large firmsd. Furthermore, they hire about 40% of the high-tech employees and have been responsible for creating approximately 65% of the new jobs over the last 20 yearse. This is an exceptional opportunity for investments in UBC R&D platforms with SMEs.
The governmental sector has its own problems in fostering ‘strategically valuable’ UXC, especially given the current economic turmoil. One example of this can be seen in Finland, where some are returning to the 1970s policy of allocating a rather small but symbolically significant share of national research funding to be purely politically governed and aimed at what the politicians call ‘strategic research,’ to support national decision-making. This arrangement will certainly neglect the wider research community, especially research activities that could be valuable in the end but which do not immediately promise a solution to the political problems at hand. Certainly, the Finnish case is not an isolated one considering the complex and turbulent environment where governmental decisions are made today. In such conditions, there will be an increasing pressure to align some of the scientific and political views on what is valuable research for the society and its decision-making.
Another European trend for improving the UXC development has been to introduce external representatives especially from the private sector, to the university governing boards (EU
2011). However, a suspicion is already emerging (Pihlanto
2014) that this is actually leading to bureaucracy and ‘measurement mania’ due to the new demand by management for data and documentation on performance and other metrics - materials that have not been routinely produced earlier at the universities and that do not easily fit into academic work or its cultural climate. The complexities involved in the management and output evaluation of UXC will not make this situation easier in the future. If the relatively mechanical way of measuring academic performance is continued and extended to UXC as it is typically currently done, by using traditional scientific publication metrics, it will certainly make impossible a dynamic development in UXC. Typical UXC-related examples not rewarded at all in most classic academic environment are producing effective infrastructure for others to use, building collaboration consortiums, preparing high-quality reports for the partners in UXC, and the constructing novel research set-ups for specific purposes.
Although overall political support exists, the university system is extremely slow in re-shaping the UXC practices. Fast and efficient models are needed for renovating and aligning UXC with the pressing societal and business needs. Fortunately, several simultaneous, although weak signs of this development seem to offer a chance to accomplish this: entrepreneurial, innovation-oriented, and cross-disciplinary education and research practices are already emerging globally in higher education. Furthermore, the emerging idea of the shared value production will change the way universities have traditionally seen their relationship with business organizations. In the following, we describe a platform-based, bottom-up approach aimed at solving these problems in UXC development by facilitating a smooth building of UXC.