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Abstract: The importance of intermediation in university-industry collaboration (UIC) has been widely acknowledged, however, the phenomenon of UIC online tools is not yet studied in detail. In this paper, we examine fifteen UIC online platforms, identify their functions and role that they play in UIC. By combining secondary data with interviews with platform developers and users, we identify five main archetypes of collaborative online platforms: education-focused, knowledge transfer platforms, crowdsourcing platforms, networking tools and platforms for innovation marketing. We also present a number of the benefits the platforms bring. These tools reduce the time and resources spent establishing and managing collaborations; they help to make networking more targeted; they help to reveal the value that university research has for business and increase the adoption of university education. Our findings suggest that whilst facing some challenges, the platforms analysed represent a scalable, rapidly growing and more importantly demand-led business opportunity.
Keywords: university-industry collaboration, innovation intermediary, online platform
1 Introduction and research problem
Effective collaboration and knowledge exchange between universities and companies has been widely acknowledged by academics, practitioners and policy makers (Perkmann et al., 2013) to create sources of corporate innovation. Given the radical differences in the objectives and rationale of 'profit-oriented enterprises' when compared to 'educational institutions' (Parker, 1992) the role of intermediary organizations, who help develop collaboration, has increased and now draws specific attention in the literature on knowledge and technology transfer (Wright et al., 2008; Kodama, 2008). Intermediaries are commonly understood to be bridging organizations, which help to develop bilateral or multilateral relationships (Dalziel, 2010). Although the academic research of innovation intermediaries is not yet focussing specifically on university-industry relations, it is readily acknowledged that many of the current challenges in university-industry collaboration (UIC) could be resolved by carefully designed intermediary services (Wright et al., 2008). Concurrently, in practice, such intermediaries are rapidly developing and bringing new forms of intermediation - one example of this is online platforms focussing on developing UIC.
The aim of this study is to identify the new or novel forms of online intermediation platforms in the UIC sphere; to analyse the role they fulfil and to identify what functions they offer for UIC. Therefore, the two underpinning research questions for this study are:
RQ1: What are...