Abstract
The academic literature has a widespread agreement that knowledge, learning and
innovation are the key to economic development and competitiveness for firms, regions and nations. Innovation in present business environment might be seen as a powerful way of securing competitive advantage as the factor of a firm’s strategy for survival. Due to complexity of innovations characteristics, change of business environment and uncertainty it is very difficult to make a recipe for “the best practice scenario”. Therefore some understanding of collaborative activities between the businesses and universities and their potentially powerful interactions for innovation should be understood better. The 21
st
century brought the idea of knowledge sharing and open innovation that might
prevail and / or overtake closed and costly research and development process. Overall, such
platform for the research and development can increase the interactions between businesses and the universities with more economically suitable and renewable breakthrough innovations. For such scenario the idea of open, networked and matched innovation is necessary.
Networking can be understood as the most important policy for any organization focused on the process of innovation. The management of innovation through matchmaking and knowledge sharing is very complex and thus requires more effort. The purpose of this M.Sc. thesis is to investigate how innovation might be made, managed and sustained through different set of interactions between universities and businesses trough networking and matchmaking with understanding the obstacles formed with the businesses – universities links and interactions.
This M.Sc. thesis describes a literature review of existing knowledge on regional, national and global level of innovation activities within networking and matchmaking platform suggestions. It also describes the results obtained through pilot and the main study done within the university scientists and interviews performed with R&D responsible persons in start-up firm, SME and large company. The empirical study was performed to understand what the obstacles are for interactions between the university scientists and businesses and what would be the acceptable innovation tools and platform for networked matchmaking innovation policy governed by university’s technology transfer office. In this thesis script the empirical studies (qualitative and quantitative) are described, the results are executed, explained and discussed. Finally, some suggestions on the best-practices for matchmaking innovation process were given and conclusions were drawn.
This scientific M.Sc. thesis work is not conducted with an aim to reveal what are the reasons for low collaboration between the university members and businesses but to find what can be the optimal performances that can expose best practices for both innovation actors through the innovation that will be focused on the research matchmaking activities. This study is only exploratory and all the conclusions made by author are solely suggestive.