Crafting University-Industry Interactions : A typology and empirical illustrations from Uppsala University, Sweden

Relying on an embedded case study over two interaction-stimulating tools of Uppsala University (AIMday and SMURF), this paper addresses four research questions concerning (1) the types of university-industry interactions, (2) the way this university crafts such interactions, (3) the perceptions and assessments made of these interactions by the various involved actors, as well as (4) the differences in such perceptions and assessments. As for the first question, we formulate a typology of university-industry interactions including “participation”, “cooperation”, “collaboration” and “relationship”. As for the second question, the paper develops a process model connecting these four types of interactions and revealing the importance of a fifth type of “potential” interactions between researchers and companies, namely “contacts”. As for the third and forth question, we identify both convergence and divergence in the perceptions and assessment of university-industry interactions made by the three involved parties – researchers, companies and university management: there is convergence in researchers’ and companies’ appreciation of contacts, cooperation and collaborations, on the one hand, and the key performance indicators applied by university management to measure such interactions, on the other hand; but a divergence appears in the relative lack of indicators measuring relationships in exhaustive ways, despite the great value that both researchers and companies attribute to them.