The Inter-professional Collaboration between University and Industry 1 Introduction Historically, universities were regarded as ivory tower since college professors used to working in isolation from the surrounding environment to some degree. And the major task of universities has been to do research and educate academics to students (Alfares et al., 2005). However, universities play a leading role in advancing the frontiers of science and technology. So since the innovation and creativity becomes a key factor to promote the economy, universities gradually have learned to be more involved in the society. The research teams compose of highly educated specialists would be increasingly crucial with challenging projects in collaboration with other organizations (Gratton& Erickson, 2007).And to survive in the highly competitive international situation, enterprises increasing recognize that to achieve successful innovation, they cannot exclusively rely on their internal R&D (Perkmann&Salter, 2012). The internal R&D cannot fulfill the growing needs of innovation and creativity in the knowledge-based economy any more. Also, creativity needs to involve a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems (Catmull, 2008). While working with external partners, such as universities, would allow them to access different pools of knowledge and save R&D costs (Chesbrough, 2003). The topic of university-industry collaboration is not new, but since 1970s it has become more system and formal. The university-industry collaboration is a win-win situation to be beneficial to both parties because collaboration enables organizations to achieve levels of performance and innovation far superior to what any one person or unit could do alone (Tapscott et al., 2009). For universities, it is an opportunities to receive more tangible or intangible resources to support the operation of research and develop their commercialization. While for industry, the main benefit for enterprise from this collaboration is that they can access to the latest research results and innovation new methodologies. It can reduce enterprises’ costs and enhance competitive advantage by creating core technology and business. What’s more, judging from the entire society, university-industry collaboration makes more innovation by upgrading knowledge and sharing experience and technology between universities and industry. 2 Models of University-Industry Collaboration Consultancy and Technical services provision It is a way to provide information and technical services to industry by universities or research center. Senior researcher or students from a university can be hired to consult or work to provide some advice which is a key characteristic of a consultancy instead of a written report to distinguish contract research. Cooperative R&D agreement It is a kind of agreement combine universities and industry. Universities provide personnel, facilities and other resources with or without reimbursement. While industrial parties offer funds, personnel, services, facilities, equipment in consistence with the research mission. Licensing Licensing is a measure to empower and authorize a third party to use exclusive or non-exclusive intellectual property by transferring less-than-ownership rights. Some small companies prefer to choose this measure. When an institution makes a licensing agreement with a company, it means the invention can be commercialized into the market. Contract research It is a contract to make the rules that industry provides funds during the process of research and the universities provides brains with the schedule in a certain months or years. The industry can utilize the unique capability of universities to create commercial benefits through the contract research. Spin-off companies Spin-off or start-up companies are new companies which separate from the original organization. During the spin-off process, there are the rights and knowledge transfer happens. 3 Shifts in University-Industry Collaboration 3.1 A Shift from technology transfer to more disciplines Although the University-Industry collaboration used to be thought within the framework of technology transfer, there are no compelling evidences to limit the collaboration only to technical fields. According to development of economy, industry also imports resources from social sciences and humanities such as global marketing and effective organizational management to enhance the comparative advantages in the global competition. Therefore, universities have begun to add social sciences and humanities in the knowledge transfer initiatives. The organizational level innovation support allows the professionals of knowledge transfer do not wait for a disclosure to appear but instead they draw the scientists’ attention to the issues that are relevant and important for the surrounding industry and other external organizations. In China, the leading universities also have begun to make more collaboration in different disciplines. In April, 2014, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, which is seemed as one of the best business school in Asia-Pacific area, has made agreements with FAW-VW Audi to build all-round university-industry collaboration. At the same time, Guanghua School of Management and FAW-VW Audi would jointly set up “Audi Management Research Center”, which is the first academic and research institution for domestic luxury car, to explore new modes of university-industry collaboration in China and boost social development by combining theoretical system from top business school and practices from Audi. The “Audi Management Research Center” is a platform for providing the case study of industry and enterprises development, offering senior management training and building professional exchange channels. At the same time, in order to deliver more talents for management to multinational corporations, state-owned enterprises and private enterprises, the two sides would set up a “FAW-VW Audi Scholarship” which can develop Executive Education curriculum and make cooperative research EMBA business case. 3.2 A shift to collaborate with governments more closely Since 1990s, some government policies have sought to promote university-university collaboration. Government organizations, local authorities and state laboratories can jointly be considered as the third party that plays an active part in the university-industry collaboration. It is notable that university-industry collaboration has enjoyed all party support. The function of the government is to offer society with public products and services and non-profit public organizations and services that cannot be privatized. There is the tendency that universities and industry want to seek more support from government not only for the preferential policy but also for the timely and accurate information. The public service platform, which are set up depending on the university and regional research institute and information station are formed by university and supported by the government, can be the university science and technology park, business incubator, technology transfer center and productive force promotion center. The three parts collaboration can create a co-innovative environment combine with firms, government laboratories and academic research groups for information exchange, R&D cooperation, enterprise incubation and other technical services under the support of policy and finance, such as the tax incentives and budgeting of funds. The local cooperation in Tsinghua University is one of the typical practices in China which represent the frontier of technology innovation. Tsinghua’s cooperation with provinces and municipalities started in the early 1980s. Based on statistics at the end of 2013, Tsinghua has established cooperation with more than 20 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, and over 80 prefecture-level cities. Tsinghua’s collaboration with local government has four ways. The first is combine local governments to open research projects which are based on the local requirements, for example, In Tianjing, Environment department in Tsinghua has been installed an emergency rescue system to deal with environment pollution accidents, the Industrial Engineering Department has designed a developmental plan for the logistics industry for chemical products in the industrial bases adjacent, while the Economics and Management School has involved in the research of the role, scale and development modal of CBD in Binhai New Area. The second is to set up cooperation funds with local authorities to serve national and regional economic development in Wuxi, Hebei, Yunnan, Guangdong, etc. The third is establish a series of research institutes with several economically developed regions, including the Pearl River Delta Region, the Yangtze River Delta Region and the Bohai Sea Region. The last one is open cooperation office in key regions, such as Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou. The main duties of the offices are to provide customized technology services, send experts to have in-depth surveys of present conditions and future potential of the enterprises and support the local government in strategic planning in view of the specific conditions of the regions. 4 Factors to Improve the Development of University-Industry Collaboration 4.1 Social & Economical Driver Globalization The globalization often links to the integrated financial systems, tariffs, trade rules and transnational economic networks and the force of globalization have provided for extraordinary growth (DeGioia, 2011). Globalization is both an opportunity and challenge. No matter for university or industry, they do not only compete within domestic any more, international and cross-cultural business and knowledge transfer has become more and more common. Knowledge-based economy It is not a new idea that knowledge plays an important role in the economy (OECD, 1996). With fuller recognition of the role of knowledge and technology in economic growth which be regarded as the external influences on production, some scientists define today as a knowledge-based economy. In knowledge-based economy, economic activities rely not only on natural resources but also on intellectual resources like know-how and expertise. In recent growth theory, knowledge could increase returns on investment, which can in turn benefit for the accumulation of knowledge. So with the important position of knowledge, there is no doubt that the enterprises suffer highly stress from competition in seeking advanced knowledge and information technology. Therefore, the university-industry collaboration in various disciplines would satisfy the strong demands in new knowledge and technology. 4.2 Knowledge Driver Innovation Lam (2005) mentions that in the knowledge-based economy, universities are now considered as important players in economic process that support national competitiveness and innovation. Open innovation seems to be a key area of opportunity for every country. There are some evidence shows the tendency that companies are looking beyond their organizational boundaries to get knowledge. As illustrated in Figure 1, the term open innovation has increasingly used in academic literature, as well as search volume in Google (Figure 2). Therefore, with the increasing demands in innovation, the core activities universities are needed to broad into new area. Open innovation not only the sharing of ideas but needs to make close collaboration between multiple stakeholders in facing a business opportunities and challenges. It is a key element to use collaboration to harness the creative abilities of stakeholders, for example scientists, universities, businesses, skilled workers, government and other institutions. Figure 1 Academic papers on open innovation (Dahlander&Gann, 2010) Figure 2 Google search volume on open innovation (Google trends analysis) Knowledge management The open innovation needs organizations to sharing knowledge through collaboration. Knowledge management is defined as the process of creating, acquiring, sharing and managing knowledge to augment individual and organizational performance (Heathfield, 2009). During the process of university-industry collaboration, technology and knowledge transfer would generate multiple kinds of knowledge and resources in one institution n or even in a department. So it is how to manage the various kinds of knowledge is increasingly essential for organizational success. Knowledge includes explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Compared with the company documents, policies, database and books, much of the intellectual capital of an organization is not written down anywhere but resides in people’s minds (Denning, 2004). With the development of enterprises and society, it is important to make human capital management for employees from industry and researchers and scientists. 5 Issues in the process of University-Industry Collaboration University and industry are two different social entities with different business models, thus leading to the significant differences and conflicts in their nature and objectives of activities. Culture differences can influence business negotiations in significant and unexpected ways (Sebenius, 2002). It is obviously that the core interest of both is different either. When they collaborate, each party would hold certain expectations for the other side. The table shows some dissimilarities which create friction between the two entities and limit their collaboration. Table Differences between university and industry There are four factors to cause the conflict in organizations, namely group identification, differences in power, status and culture, competition over scarce resources and ambiguity over jurisdiction. The gaps between university and industry could also be move round the four parts. 5.1 Culture differences in university-industry collaboration One of the most important barriers is the culture difference which permeates every corner in university-industry collaboration, such as stakeholders have different norms, standards and values under diverse organizational environments (Siegel, 2003). Enterprises in industry usually do not want to publish the results of research and share information with colleagues and the general public. Instead, they treat technology as the one should be kept its proprietary and used for strategic advantage in profit seeking. In industry, people tend to regard their scientific and technological research and products as proprietary resources. While from the perspective of university, they believe that the ownership of knowledge in scientific activities is not belonged to private, but to the public (Diedonck, 1990). On the other hand, the relationship between university and industry is cooperation in most of the time rather than integration. And it is harder to make balance between university and industry in terms of the existence of culture differences. So there is no doubt that the collaboration has the weaknesses in group identification. 5.2 Argument in intellectual property rights Issues on the ownership of the intellectual property rights are also make tensions between university and industry (Cyert&Goodman, 1997). Intellectual property is one of the scarce resources that refer to creations of the mind, such as inventions, designs, symbols, names and images. Because of the university-industry collaboration, research and innovations are often worked together by both sides. So the affiliation and resource investment make it harder to identify which party should have the ownership of the intellectual property rights. Universities could want to protect proprietary rights of inventions even before the beginning of collaboration. However, it is difficult to acquire such kind of rights in terms of a long term process and high cost. As pointed out by Siegel (2003), intellectual property right issues are an insurmountable barrier in some cases to make hard line negotiations since universities are too aggressive in exercising intellectual property rights. 5.3 Time in research Time is the other barrier for university and industry. The academic researchers always provide themselves with several years to accomplish a research subject, while industrialist often thinks in terms of months. 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