BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN UNIVERSITY AND INDUSTRY: THREE MECHANISMS FOR INNOVATION EFFICIENCY

A key challenge for competence networking is the difficulty of contextual understanding between people from different organizations. Despite close collaboration, full insight into a company is difficult, although desirable, for university partners to achieve and vice versa. The case study described in this paper is of a company with long experience of university–industry collaboration. The paper reports on a designerly approach to overcome barriers of university–industry collaboration. The approach is combined with strategic, tactic and operational dimensions. It builds on three corresponding mechanisms: a tool to facilitate strategic understanding, workshops to facilitate tactical co-creation, and prototyping to facilitate operational ideation.