Benefits of University-Industry R&D Collaborations: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

University-Industry R&D collaboration (UIC) project is a temporary organization with a collaborative work environment, with heterogeneous partners who have collective responsibilities, and seek to grant benefits to their different stakeholders. This paper aims to gather and bring understanding into what these benefits are, and, through a systematic literature review (SLR) develops a catalog of these benefits in the specific context of UIC projects. The SLR revealed 213 initial papers that after the application of the exclusion criteria was reduced to 125 and of those after the analysis only 54 papers were selected. From these, 45 benefits of UIC projects were identified with varying frequency values, such as ‘Patents’, ‘Publications’ and ‘New Knowledge Creation’. The collection of benefits was then divided into three categories – Outputs, Outcomes, and Impacts – where it was found that the number of Outputs mentioned in literature was residual when compared to the identified Outcomes and Impacts, highlighting that the benefits of UIC projects go much further beyond the direct Outputs of the project. These results can be used as a source of information for benefits management of UIC projects and for supporting the development of a methodology to evaluate the benefits and societal impact of UIC projects.