University-industry collaborative research (UIC) is an increasingly mandated mechanism to promote innovation and to tackle intractable national problems. Around the world, billions of dollars are invested annually by governments, keen to co-create innovation through a triple-helix model, and to improve the way businesses and universities work together. While some may see this as simply government co-creating public value by bringing researchers and industrial end-users together, in many cases the way governments currently evaluate applications for UIC research funding fails to formally assess the capacity of the participants to collaborate effectively together.
Given the significant expenditure throughout the OECD (and wider) upon UIC research approaches, there are enormous implications from a public value perspective if such collaborations are effective or otherwise. An improvement in the collaborative competency of research participants, with a potential concomitant improvement in collaborative outcomes, of just a few percentage points, would return significantly enhanced public value. This research aims to broaden the discussion about collaborative research competencies, which has largely centered upon local government, social services, and biomedical collaborations, to the dedicated university-industry research environment, and in particular to the ‘innovation’ push.
The research question focuses upon the degree to which the collaborative competence of research participants is factored into decision-making when awarding government research funding. A review of academic and grey literature led to inferences that assessment of collaborative competencies remains largely unaccounted for in the funding application stage. A qualitative pilot study, using open-ended questions, interviewed a number of relevant government officials (n=6). The study confirmed the inference, leading to an overall ongoing research question, which is: When assessing applications for funding, how can public administrators better assess the capacity of UIC research partners to collaborate competently?
The discussion draws upon and extends a number of theoretical strands, public governance theories. UIC research takes place not only within government, business and university administrative contexts, but also within a human relationship context. Therefore, it is important to understand how these environments interact, and how the administrative context might facilitate both the network and the personal human context, and vice versa.
The pilot study concluded that, in the sample population of departmental employees interviewed, collaborative competencies are largely unaccounted for when applications for collaborative research funding are assessed, although some informal processes were identified. This paper argues that more discussion around this topic could result in the inclusion of collaborative competencies in the funding assessment process, and that governance regimes need to be fit-for-purpose.
