Open data partnerships between firms and universities: The role of boundary organizations
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Published version
Author(s)
Perkmann, M
Schildt, H
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Science-intensive firms are experimenting with ‘open data’ initiatives, involving collaboration with academic scientists whereby all results are published with no restriction. Firms seeking to benefit from open data face two key challenges: revealing R&D problems may leak valuable information to competitors, and academic scientists may lack motivation to address problems posed by firms. We explore how firms overcome these challenges through an inductive study of the Structural Genomics Consortium. We find that the operation of the consortium as a boundary organization provided two core mechanisms to address the above challenges. First, through mediated revealing, the boundary organization allowed firms to disclose R&D problems while minimizing adverse competitive consequences. Second, by enabling multiple goals the boundary organization increased the attractiveness of industry-informed agendas for academic scientists. We work our results into a grounded model of boundary organizations as a vehicle for open data initiatives. Our study contributes to research on public-private research partnerships, knowledge revealing and boundary organizations.
Date Issued
2015-06
Date Acceptance
2014-12-14
Citation
Research Policy, 2015, 44 (5), pp.1133-1143
ISSN
0048-7333
Publisher
Elsevier
Start Page
1133
End Page
1143
Journal / Book Title
Research Policy
Volume
44
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© 2014 The authors. This is an open access article under the creative commons license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Sponsor
Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
Identifier
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733314002248/pdfft?md5=cb6552dbcdd3eff123da567d199964c5&pid=1-s2.0-S0048733314002248-main.pdf
Grant Number
ES/G038082/1
Subjects
Social Sciences
Management
Business & Economics
Open data
Industrial R&D
Selective revealing
Boundary organization
University-industry relations
Open innovation
Research partnership
RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT
OPEN INNOVATION
CUMULATIVE INNOVATION
SCIENCE
COLLABORATION
KNOWLEDGE
NETWORKS
GOVERNANCE
INDUSTRY
COMMONS
Open data
Industrial R&D
Selective Revealing
Boundary Organization
University-industry relations
Open innovation
Science Studies
1402 Applied Economics
1503 Business and Management
1505 Marketing
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2014-12-26