Why collaborate? exploring industry´s strategic objectives for establishing industry-university technology relationships

An extensive literature continues to grow on the advantages of inter-organizational collaboration for facilitating the advancement of new technologies. While much of this literature focuses on the dynamics and outcomes between two or more industrial firms, this study concentrates on inter-organizational collaboration between industrial firms and universities. The authors´ focus on industry-university (I/U) relationships is propitious since I/U alliances are a growing and important trend in inter-organizational collaboration. Several studies have explored the role of I/U collaboration with respect to advancing new technologies. However, the firm´s strategic objectives for I/U collaboration and the extent to which these strategic objectives differ among firms has been largely neglected. To address these issues, this paper reports the results from a multi-method, cross-sectional, exploratory field study which focused on two research questions: (1) what are the firm´s strategic objectives for establishing I/U technology relationships?; and (2) to what extent do these strategic objectives differ among firms?