Success factors and barriers in industry-academia collaborations - a descriptive model

Companies cannot overcome the increasing complexity of nowadays cyber-physical systems alone. Thus, the industry uses academic research as an important source for gaining new knowledge and technologies. However, a successful exchange is fraught with barriers, so it is important to understand the success factors and barriers. This paper presents a model explaining the most relevant success factors and barriers to industry-academia collaborations and their relations. Based on a systematic literature review, an interview study, an online survey, and focus groups, we identified 22 relevant success factors and 22 barriers. We clustered these success factors and barriers into five categories: communication & feedback, information & (technical) support, motivation & commitment, people & team, and structure & organization. We believe that our model will help improve industry-academia collaboration's success by raising awareness of the barriers and offering success factors as setting levers. Furthermore, our model can serve as the basis for further research of methods for and to support industry-academia collaboration. Therefore, we intend to develop a methodology for challenge-driven industry-academia collaboration.

Subjects

Barriers

Industry-Academia Collaboration

Knowledge Management

Reference System Management

Research Industry Collaboration

Success Factors

Technology Transfer

University Research

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Success factors and barriers in industry-academia collaborations - a descriptive model