Abstract:

The growing competition in businesses and globalization is forcing businesses and industries to explore new ways to innovate (ROHRBECK, 2006). University-Industry collaboration can be a powerful and effective tool in innovation and in knowledge transfer (ROHRBECK, 2006). The largest European study on university-business cooperation - The Set of University-Business Cooperation Report, 2018 - shows that this kinds of partnerships can have a very positive impact on all parties involved, although there is still a limited engagement of businesses in this type of collaboration. The same report provides a detailed set of recommendations, case studies and analysis, in order to allow the improvement of this cooperation.

According to this report, "the majority of academics and businesses still do not engage in university-business collaboration, although the vast majority of higher education institutions (HEI) do, to a certain extent. This limited engagement is reducing labour market relevance of the study programs, the employability of graduates and the impact of research".

Despite the investment that HEI do in research and development (R&D), sometimes this R&D is disconnected of real business life. Other problem, particularly serious in Portugal, is that small and medium enterprises (SME) often are driven only to short term profitability and sustainability, with few concerns (and with no capacity) on innovation.

This research project aims to develop a toolkit that can be used by all businesses, but specially SME (since they are the larger majority of businesses in Portugal) that allows these organizations to engage, implement, absorb and measure the impact of business-industry collaborative partnerships.

We start by an extensive literature review, and after that by analysing the Know Now Know How (ww.rede.iseclisboa.pt) Network, a private industry-academy collaboration experience in Lisbon, as a first case study. This is a private network, launched in January 2016, that nowadays aggregates 150 partners, HEI's, businesses, NGO's, public administration institutions and schools, with the main aims of knowledge transfer, employability of the students, future workers, and the development of R&D that really has an application in real businesses and industries.

This paper presents the Know Now Know How network, the work that was born in this network for the past almost 3 years and the results of a survey conducted among the partners on the functioning of the network, it's advantages and disadvantages, and on present and future needs.

From this we try to draw some light on the development of a toolkit that both HEI and businesses can use to improve the engagement in business-academy collaboration and also in establishing a set of key performance indicators that allow to evaluate these partnerships.

Keywords:

Science-to-business, university-industry collaboration, industry-academy partnerships, knowledge transfer, technology transfer, collaborative R&D, innovation.