Maturity Model for Collaborative R&D University-Industry Sustainable Partnerships

Abstract University-Industry collaborations in R&D have grown significantly in recent years. In more developed economies, governments encourage, by finance, collaboration and the exchange of knowledge between private industry and universities. However, it is still a challenge for organizations and universities to identify the best practices adopted to establish and sustain collaboration. This has led to the growing need to establish practices and principles to guide the initiation, implementation and assessment of successful collaboration. Therefore, maturity models can be a way of establishing and sustaining collaboration as it helps organizations and universities to evaluate their processes against best practices and propose actions for improvement. This paper introduces preliminary results of ongoing research to create a maturity model for the sustainable university-industry relationship. This model based literature review and on a six-year experience of the relationship between the University of Minho and Bosch Car Multimedia (Braga)