How Businesses Should Govern Knowledge-Intensive Collaborations with Universities: An Empirical Investigation of University Professors

In light of the high rel­e­vance of uni­ver­si­ties as sources of knowl­edge, uni­ver­sity-busi­ness col­lab­o­ra­tion (UBC) of­fers sig­nif­i­cant op­por­tu­ni­ties for busi­nesses with re­spect to mak­ing use of ex­ter­nal aca­d­e­mic re­search and in­no­va­tion sup­port. Un­like knowl­edge-in­ten­sive col­lab­o­ra­tion with other busi­nesses, UBC has par­tic­u­lar­i­ties which need to be con­sid­ered, no­tably the role of pro­fes­sors as in­di­vid­ual de­ci­sion mak­ers. Ad­di­tion­ally, to as­sign in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty rights to knowl­edge and to re­duce the dan­ger of op­por­tunis­tic be­hav­ior, mu­tu­ally ben­e­fi­cial UBC re­quires ad­e­quate gov­er­nance mech­a­nisms. As pre­vi­ous re­search has not in­ves­ti­gated the ef­fects of gov­er­nance mech­a­nisms on knowl­edge shar­ing (knowl­edge com­bi­na­tion, learn­ing, and co-poiesis) and the achieve­ment of joint goals in UBC, our em­pir­i­cal study cov­er­ing 415 Ger­man pro­fes­sors ex­am­ines these re­la­tions. We find a pos­i­tive in­flu­ence of re­la­tional gov­er­nance and a neg­a­tive in­flu­ence of trans­ac­tional gov­er­nance on knowl­edge shar­ing in UBC. Re­gard­ing the in­flu­ence of knowl­edge shar­ing on the achieve­ment of joint goals, we find pos­i­tive im­pacts of knowl­edge com­bi­na­tion and co-poiesis and a neg­a­tive im­pact of learn­ing on the achieve­ment of joint goals.

Autor:

Clauß, Thomas & Kesting, Tobias