PhD project title: In search of the foundations of successful collaboration in research-innovation… (# of pos: 4)

Topic background: Wetsus is a network which could be described as a quadruple/quintuple (Q/Q)helix network (Cloitre et al, 2022), which entails that university research in collaboration with government and industrial partners, coined originally as the triple helix (Etzkowitz & Leydendorf, 2000), is done in a field where environment and civil society play a role, especially in transition type of processes. In Wetsus university, industry and government collaborate on developing environmental oriented solutions to water issues as experienced in civil society. In the literature looking at the Q/Q helixes it is assumed that formal and informal  interaction between institutional actors determines the development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem(s) in which transitions are being formed (Spigl et al, 2015). However we contend that this research is mostly on meso and macro institutional level and the micro level and relation to higher levels are underdeveloped (see also Rip & Groen, 2003).  In this research project we will go deeper into the interaction patterns between collaborating in the context of the Q/Q helix to understand successful collaboration in projects and programs better. This will lead to more insights how to manage such networks of collaboration in the light of more societal value creation in research and industry thus enhancing the efficiency of research and innovation resources.

Research challenges: From sociology there is a long history  (a.o. Parsons, 1937, 1961, 1979), where basic assumptions of classical economic theory, and also more modern institutional theories are contested as being over- or under socialized (Granovetter, 1985), both neglecting the effect of ongoing social relations on multilevel structures and the outcomes of actions in collaborative systems. In the case of university-industry interaction this is of high importance due to the different backgrounds and goals of the actors in the collaboration. In  this research project we work on this gap by comparing on multiple levels of aggregation how social relations influence the developments of projects in which actors from different backgrounds collaborate to develop impactful innovations. We use a four dimensional social system theory (Parsons, 1961, 1979) inspired model for entrepreneurial processes (Groen, 2005) in which we can depict the processual development of the creation of an innovative business looking at strategic, organizational, economic and social network development. So far in this model mostly elements of the model have been tested (getting finance, Heuven et al, 2012, goal complementarity, Pullen et al, 2012, trust, Klein Woolthuis et al,  nature of network relations, Kirwan et al, 2019 and more). These partial explanations are interesting, however, we assume that there are patterns of different factors together which explain the successful collaboration more complete. Furthermore, it is likely that there are more than one pattern which leads to successful innovative business from a collaboration.  Moreover, in recent research on corporate entrepreneurial innovative projects we found a deviation from the commonly assumed continues character of processes, the processes may have a more punctuated character and need a multilevel perspective to understand them well as shown by Gersick in within organization teams research (Gersick, 1988, 1991), as in our case we will study between organization project teams we expect this to be even more likely. 

To find social system configurations of social factors and processes which predict successful outcome of collaboration in university-industry collaboration is the challenge in this research.

Keywords: complex entrepreneurial innovation, multi-level, punctuated systems, impact

Professor/University group/Wetsus supervisor(s): Prof.dr. A.J. Groen, professor of entrepreneurship & valorization, University of Groningen. Wetsus supervisors: Dr. Elmar Fuchs/Xiaoxia Liu