PARTNERSHIP AND INNOVATION IN THE LIFE SCIENCES - Innovation in the Biopharmaceutical Industry - page 116

Dasgupta and Stiglitz, 1980; Cantwell and Barrera, 1998; Cantwell and Iammarino,
2000; Oxley and Sampson, 2004).
Growing role of university partnerships
The increasing government spend on R&D in universities, improving record of
successful intellectual property management, increasing management capability
within universities to support industrial liaison and more flexible approaches to
forming partnerships, have collectively made universities more attractive partners
for industry (Jaffe, 1986; Jaffe, 1996; DTI, 2001, 2005; Lambert, 2003; Debackere
and Veugelers, 2005). This has encouraged an increase in collaborative activities
and for example, 77% of UK biotechnology companies now partner with one or
more universities (Zeckhauser, 1996; Chesbrough, 2003; AUTM, 2005; UNICO,
2005; CBI, 2005).
A wide range of methods are used when partnering. These include defined
contracts (activity-based), defined technologies (input-based), or defined strategies
(output-based). Other than Debackere and Veugelers (2005) who have analysed
how the role of technology transfer offices varies in Europe, to date, no studies have
explored the nature of these partnerships in the context of R&D partnering between
universities and industry. Hence, there is a gap in our knowledge of the nature of
university-industry partnerships, what works and why, and the barriers and enablers
of success, a finding which is surprising, given the substantial resources invested to
encourage such partnerships which are mooted to be the engine of economic growth
(DTI, 2004).
Methodology
Primary research for the study used qualitative method of inquiry and involved
interviews with key informants using a topic guide which was piloted and iteratively
refined before application (Mays and Pope, 1995). The interviews explored the
nature of R&D collaborations and the extent of involvement in the partnering process
for a diverse group of organisations.
We used theoretical (non-random) sampling over two stages (Strauss and Corbin,
1998). An initial set of key informants were “purposively” identified to capture a
diverse group for the first stage of interviews. Additional key informants were further
recruited by “snowballing” technique. Notes were recorded during the course of the
interview and the research team reviewed findings in regular meetings to identify
emerging themes, triangulate findings and identify saturation points when no new
information was emerging. Data were grouped by emerging themes and iterative
analyses allowed further categorisation of data by sub-themes derived from the main
themes (Pope and Mays, 2000).