Multilateral Collaborations Between University and Industry: A Mixed-Methods Approach Yielding 10 Characteristics for Successful Innovations in the Era of Digitization

Due to the increasing innovation pressure of industry, joint research between industry and science has become enormously important in recent years. Increasing complexity of the industry offer, the digital transformation and the upcoming of new forms of work, collaboration increasingly switches from classic bilateral collaborations between one company and one scientific partner towards multilateral research cooperation. A wide range of collaborative research formats are existing, facilitating bilateral collaboration between industry and research to aim a defined goal and facilitating mutual benefit. Accompanying research on collaboration performance exists for bilateral collaborative initiatives. However, still little research on formats for multilateral research cooperation exists. In the following study we want to identify existing forms of multilateral cooperation between industry and science and analyse them according to their collaboration performance in the age of digitalisation. Therefore, in a first step, desktop research was conducted to identify real, existing collaborations between industry and science. Within those, relevant key characteristics which affects the performance of multilateral collaboration were derived (such as “number of partners”, “partnership structure”, “funding model”, “contractual arrangements”). In the second step, seven representatives of real multilateral collaborations were interviewed to characterise their research cooperations. The survey captures different perspectives of research collaboration management, the business partners, and the partners from academia. The third step involved an analysis of the interview results, which finally were merged with the findings from literature and formed the foundation for defining the ten relevant characteristics of successful research collaborations.