Developing Exploratory Innovation Capabilities in University-Industry Collaborations

It has been widely acknowledged that innovation and a firm’s innovative capabilities have become the keystones for success in the 21st century. Innovation capabilities range from exploitative for incremental commercial... [ view full abstract ]

It has been widely acknowledged that innovation and a firm’s innovative capabilities have become the keystones for success in the 21st century. Innovation capabilities range from exploitative for incremental commercial benefit to explorative for enhanced technological knowhow, breakthrough innovations and fundamental scientific understandings. Firms are increasingly likely to look to universities for the creation and development of such capabilities. In turn, governments around the world have committed significant resources and support for university/industry collaboration to facilitate the knowledge production system for firms. There is however little empirical literature that examines how these collaborations bring about increased innovation capability within collaborating firms. This paper explores the creation and development of innovation capabilities in firms through university- industry collaborations. The research method for this paper is a single qualitative case study of a multi-project research programme that was co-funded by industry and government in Ireland. The principal finding is that there are three interlocking building blocks of exploratory innovation capabilities that develop in the firm from blue-sky research collaboration with university partners: improved creativity and idea generation; increased tolerance for ambiguity and problem solving; and elevated propensity for risk taking.