International Journal of Technology Management & Sustainable Development - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2015

While the spin-out funnel has received professional support to enhance its effects in most western universities, much less attention has been paid to the possibility to enhance the effects of academic engagement (i.e. publications, meetings and collaborative research among others) in the knowledge exchange activities of universities. By using the case of Uppsala University as a reference, the aim of this paper is to describe how a holistic organization for innovation support can be managed to create mutual benefits both for the external organizations, the society, the university itself as well as its faculties. Four key elements seem to be of importance to the effectiveness of the support organization: (1) the alignment with selected goals and activities of the university; (2) the recruitment strategy, with innovation support officers possessing double competences; (3) building trust, among all stakeholders and (4) the introduction of specific tools to enhance the effects of academia-industry interactive activities.

We conclude that a holistic approach provides many benefits for the university as well as for the external organizations involved. An important finding is that the commercialization funnel and academic engagement are not two separate tracks but actually seem to lever each other’s so that commercialization seems to be important to build trust and stimulate the academic engagement as well as for embedding the university innovation support units in the industrial network, and the later may result in concrete commercialization projects. Our results also indicate that this broader strategy for innovation support seems to appeal better to the fields of humanities and social science compared to traditional tech-transfer. Still, many results need to be codified, and more research is needed to fully understand the impact of academia-industry interactions over time.

The role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in developing the innovative capacity of societies is well recognized. As the main producers of knowledge, they contribute directly and indirectly to economic growth. Yet, little is known on the engagement of universities in developing countries with their social and economic environment. This article adopts a quantitative approach to identify the main factors affecting the role of Algerian HEIs in promoting and cooperating with their economic and social environment.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the Egyptian national innovation system and its main components. It aims to identify the barriers and the drivers to university–industry collaboration. Four hypotheses are proposed to measure the barriers and drivers to university–industry collaboration. These hypotheses are tested using correlation analysis and Z test based on data collected from 162 companies from industrial areas and free zones around Cairo and Alexandria. The results of the study support the proposed four hypotheses.

The municipality of Santa Rita do Sapucaí, located in Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, has only 37,000 inhabitants and a tradition of decades in agricultural production. In 1959, a technical school in the electronics field was founded in this city, being the first one in Latin America and the seventh in the world. The valley where the city lies began to change its character, development pattern and even its personality. In the 1970s a few small businesses were created inside school laboratories, becoming an industrial cluster in 1985, when the city mayor started a marketing campaign, naming the city as the Valley of Electronics. The changes began to attract more students, researchers and entrepreneurs from all around the country and abroad. Currently there are almost 150 companies in electronics and telecommunication fields, which employ nearly one-third of the population and produce $1.7 billion in revenue every year. This article presents a case study conducted in this cluster, presenting the analysis of relationships between firms, schools and the local and federal government and how they do business among themselves and with foreign markets; the exchange of knowledge between companies, educational and research institutes, the management and institutional support in the cluster; and how R&D is financed by private and public capital. The final section presents the considerations about the central role of education in strengthening the development and sustainability of the Valley of Electronics.

Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are perfect exemplars of creative organizations partly because they have fewer corporate rules and regulations that hinder creative behaviors of individual employees. Yet, we know very little of the actual processes SMEs employ in their creative endeavours. This appears to reflect the general state of creativity research where emphasis is usually placed on antecedents and outcomes of creativity with relatively less attention on how organizations actually organize their creative activities. This article takes a step towards addressing this paucity in creativity research by suggesting organizational routines as an analytical tool to explore the processes of creativity in small software firms. The article argues that routines offer an entry point to understanding SMEs when conceptualized as systemic blueprints that are capable of explaining observable and sometimes latent behaviours of organizational actors’. A suite of methodologies that could be employed by researchers adopting a routines’ perspective in exploring organizational phenomenon are also identified.