Abstract
Divergent time norms between participating organizations constitute a central barrier to cross-sectoral collaborations. We unpack this tension by studying two distinct time-utilization strategies of university and industry in 1845 R&D consortia. The paper shows that collaborating organizations that are subject to divergent time norms can shift the time focus in their favor through the strategic timing of repeated ties. If university-industry consortia are repeated, this repetition tends to take place either at the beginning of the consortium (parallel timing) or at the end (sequential timing) but typically not in the middle. Industry partners seek to “compress time” by working on different consortia in parallel and therefore want to repeat a collaboration early, whereas universities seek to “extend time” through sequential timing of consortia, i.e., repeat a collaboration at the end or after a consortium has ended. We provide a qualitative substantiation of the identified time-utilization strategies and show that both options coexist in multipartner consortia.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 103829 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-9 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Research Policy |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2019 |
Funding
All consortia carry out publicly funded R&D projects financed by a long-standing Dutch technology program that facilitates R&D collaboration between university and industry. We derived the data from statutory annual evaluation reports, including descriptions of the consortium goal, members, the consortium’s start and end, etc. This research context provides an ideal opportunity to investigate the timing of repeated collaboration because (I) the consortia are funded only if the composition of consortia fits the minimum funding requirements needed to stimulate collaboration; (II) repeated collaboration is important in this context as research agendas are likely to exceed the boundaries of a single R&D consortium; (III) in contrast to earlier studies (e.g., Gulati, 1995 ), both the consortium’s start and end are reported, allowing for fine-grained examination of the timing of repeated collaboration; (IV) available data allow tracing the timing of repeated collaboration 5 years after the consortium’s start and 5 years after its end; and (V) variance in consortium composition allows examining distinct types of repeated collaboration.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Dutch technology program that facilitates R&D collaboration between university and industry |
Keywords
- Collaboration barriers
- Multipartner R&D-consortia
- Repeated collaboration
- Time norms and timing preferences
- University-industry collaboration
