Special issue of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice
in association with the XIII Triple Helix Conference 2015 at Tsinghua University,
Beijing China (21-23 August 2015)
University-Industry R&D Connections:
boundary-spanning bridges or boulevards of broken dreams ?
Deadline for submission: 1st November 2015,
Anticipated publication date: December 2016
Guest editors:
Poh Kam WONG (National University of Singapore), Email: PohKam@nus.edu.sg
Robert TIJSSEN (Leiden University, Netherlands; Stellenbosch University, South Africa),
Email: Tijssen@cwts.leidenuniv.nl
Mei-Chih HU (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan), Email: mchu@mx.nthu.edu.tw
Jin CHEN (Tsinghua University, China), Email: chenjin@sem.tsinghua.edu.cn
This special issue will be devoted to new studies and insights on university engagement with
the business sector in general, and R&D cooperation with industry in particular.
This subject area is becoming a top priority at many universities worldwide. Especially the
universities of technology and those who see themselves as ‘entrepreneurial university’. Their
activities on the interface of science and industry are seen as an increasingly important feature
of their ‘third mission’ profile as academic ‘engines of innovation’.
Productive academic interactions with the business sector are driven by many factors,
covering the full range from spontaneous micro-level individual initiatives, to mesolevel
university missions and strategies, and macro-level government policies with longer-term
socioeconomic goals. The objectives and processes of those university-industry encounters
span a wide range of outcomes - from sharing expensive testing equipment to co-developing
new medicines.
Although each university operates within its own unique environment, with its own set of
research priorities and focal areas, they may have much in common in their motives and
strategies when addressing corporate R&D needs, spinning out their own science-based
companies, and interacting with the world’s largest technology companies.
The current academic literature comprises of many disconnected case studies scattered across
a range of subfields and scholarly journals. It is still relatively small literature - especially in
Asia, Latin America, and Africa - in need of expansion and coherence to draw out lessons of
general interest to university research management and government policy-makers.
We welcome all manuscripts on university-industry R&D connections and interactions, –
emerging from basic research or from applied practice-oriented studies. Our main interest is
on studies from the university perspective. Any paper on a topic of relevance to scholars,
administrators or managers will be considered: from case studies of individual universities
based on scientometric data, conceptual or theoretical papers of university-industry linkages
within science-innovation ecosystems, to papers dealing within issues at multidisciplinary
interface of management, business, and innovation studies.
If you're interested to submit a manuscript to this issue, please consider the possibility of
joining us at the Triple Helix Association's XIII Triple Helix Conference 2015 in Beijing,
China (21-23 August 2015) to present your paper at our special session on this topic.