The closed model of corporate innovation—research conducted behind proprietary walls, protected by patents, and commercialized through internal development pipelines—has given way to open innovation, where organizations deliberately source external knowledge and share internal knowledge to accelerate the innovation process. Universities, with their fundamental research capabilities and talent pipelines, are the natural partners in this opening, but the collaboration is rarely as smooth as the theory suggests.
Baban, Băban, and Mitran (2023) investigate what drives industrial firms to perceive universities as valuable knowledge sources, analyzing three categories of antecedents: motivations (what firms hope to gain), barriers (what discourages collaboration), and knowledge transfer channels (how collaboration actually works). Using ordinal regression with neural network validation, they find that the perceived importance of university collaboration depends primarily on the channels through which knowledge flows—joint research projects, personnel mobility (hiring university graduates, academic sabbaticals in industry), and informal professional networks—rather than on abstract motivations. The practical implication is that policies aimed at increasing university-industry collaboration should focus on building specific channels rather than exhorting firms to collaborate more. Creating co-located research facilities, funding joint PhD positions, and supporting industry-academic mobility programs are more effective than general innovation vouchers or tax credits.
Fitriasari, Sensuse, and Hidayat (2024) map the research landscape through systematic literature review, identifying dominant themes, emerging technologies, and conceptual frameworks in university-industry open innovation. Their analysis reveals that the field has evolved from studying whether university-industry collaboration is beneficial (the evidence is clear that it is) to studying how it works in practice—the governance structures, intellectual property arrangements, cultural differences, and incentive misalignments that determine whether collaboration produces publishable research, commercializable innovation, both, or neither. The review identifies a persistent tension: universities optimize for knowledge creation and dissemination (publications, open access), while firms optimize for knowledge capture and appropriation (patents, trade secrets). Managing this tension requires governance frameworks that give each party enough of what they value to sustain the collaboration without either side feeling exploited.
Langa, Mkwambisi, and Dougill (2025) examine open innovation in developing economies, where the challenges are amplified by weaker institutional frameworks, fewer research-intensive universities, and smaller pools of absorptive capacity in industry. Their systematic review finds that open innovation in developing contexts often takes different forms than in developed economies: less patent-based formal collaboration and more informal knowledge networks, diaspora connections, and technology adaptation from foreign sources. The review identifies a critical gap: most open innovation frameworks were developed in and for OECD countries with strong intellectual property regimes and well-funded research universities. Applying these frameworks in developing economies without adaptation often fails because the institutional assumptions do not hold—creating the need for context-specific open innovation models that account for informal knowledge flows, limited IP enforcement, and the role of international development organizations as innovation intermediaries.