The role of knowledge during the emergence of university-industry collaborations in emerging economies: a literature review

Organizations create value based on their proprietary knowledge or on additional
knowledge resources from outside of the organization. The inter-organizational
collaborations that emerge as such stem from the organization’s needs to engage in
knowledge exploration and/or exploitation activities. Exploration represents the
production of new knowledge and exploitation, on the other hand, focuses on use
and leverage of existing knowledge. While the goals to collaborate might be
different for universities and firms in a university-industry setting, both parties
possess knowledge bases and expertise that can be leveraged in a collaboration. US
and European literature acknowledges the role of knowledge in initiating these
University-Industry collaborations (UIC). At the same time, recent economic
growth in Emerging Economies (EE), particularly in Asia, paves the way for more
intense UIC. As such, the need to understand the initiation of collaborations in EE
is increasing. The aim of this paper is to present a literature review on the role of
knowledge during the initial phases of inter-organizational collaborations between
universities and industries, particularly in EE. Therefore, we address the following
research question: “How do knowledge resources influence the emergence of
University-Industry collaborations in Emerging Economies?”. In the literature
review, we discuss how universities’ and firms’ knowledge bases and absorptive
capacity affect their respective interest in engagement in inter-organizational
collaborations. We combine this overview with the state of the art literature on UIC
in EE and formulate hypotheses. Based on this paper, universities and firms in EE
can improve their strategies for setting up new UIC.