Levers of Management in University-Industry Collaborations: How project management affects value creation at different life-cycle stages of a collaboration

This paper reports a longitudinal multi-case research project encompassing 38 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012 with four students, 12 researchers and 22 companies relating to a total of 25 university–industry collaborations. The interviews covered the collaboration type, the initiation of the collaboration and details concerning the planning of the collaboration. In addition, the interviews focused on the relationships between the people involved in the collaboration and the effects of project management. We distinguish between project management success and project success, and identify potential good practice. The paper concludes that, whereas project management success was not found to be causally related to project success, there seems to be a clearer link between project management success and ensuring effective use of resources in both companies and universities. There is also evidence that it is problematic when corporate managers think they can run research projects like lean production companies.