Negotiating Research Collaborations

The 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 (𝐏𝐑𝐨𝐅) teaching case shows how a large healthcare consortium and a small group of manufacturers collaborated to rethink innovation in a highly regulated sector. At its core, the case demonstrates how PRoF turned the interaction between two very different communities into its main innovation engine. The large consortium represents the healthcare user community: nurses, doctors, caregivers, patients, and hospital managers who express the lived reality of care. Their contribution is experiential and value-based. Through structured “brainwave sessions,” they surface latent needs and convert them into broad keywords such as comfort, privacy, dignity, or anti-loneliness. These keywords form a shared language that avoids technical jargon and allows hundreds of users with diverse perspectives to converge around common priorities. The small consortium consists of manufacturers, architects, and designers who have the capabilities to transform these user insights into concrete room concepts. Their commercial goals are kept strictly outside the creative process, allowing trust to grow between the groups. Once the user community defines the keywords, the producer community develops prototypes, after which the large consortium returns to evaluate and refine them. This modular sequencing keeps tensions low, ensures rapid progress, and prevents commercial logic from dominating user needs. The interaction between these two communities solves a longstanding problem in healthcare innovation: suppliers often misunderstand user needs, while users lack the means to innovate. PRoF bridges this gap by letting users drive ideation and letting producers translate that insight into solutions. What emerges is a genuinely user-oriented innovation ecosystem in which neither community could succeed alone, but together they generate concepts that reshape expectations of care design. You can find the case study at HBSP: https://lnkd.in/e6nxTFM7 #UserCentricInnovation #Collaboration #OpenInnovation #CrossCommunityCollaboration #HealthcareEcosystems #CoCreation #Ideation

What if we stopped treating university-SME collaboration as a “nice to have” and started treating it as economic infrastructure? A new report from CSIRO and the University of Queensland reveals what actually happens when small and medium enterprises (SMEs) work with universities and research institutions (URIs). The results are compelling. Collaborations between SMEs and URIs are widely acknowledged as drivers of innovation. But this report digs deeper, asking: what’s the real commercial payoff for the firms involved? Based on a survey of 201 Australian businesses across diverse sectors and regions, Commercial Outcomes of SME–Research Collaboration analyses three types of engagement: 🔹 Facilitated dollar-matched programmes 🔹Competitive grants 🔹Student placement programmes The findings? 🔹66% of SMEs reported new or improved products—clear evidence that collaboration brings ideas to market. 🔹Prototypes, independent validation, and derisked R&D were common outcomes, especially for early-stage firms. 🔹Facilitated, entry-level collaborations delivered outcomes nearly on par with large, competitive grants—but with smaller budgets and greater accessibility. 🔹Regional SMEs outperformed their metro counterparts across nearly all dimensions, from innovation to credibility to market expansion. Sectoral insights are equally striking: 🔹Medtech and biotech firms focused on R&D derisking; 🔹Manufacturing and digital tech SMEs reported strong product development outcomes; 🔹Energy businesses used partnerships to validate solutions for market credibility. In New Zealand, we often underinvest in the connective tissue that makes innovation happen. This report shows that well-designed, fit-for-purpose collaboration programmes can unlock capability, especially for regional and smaller firms. The message is clear: industry-university collaboration is a catalyst. And in an economy where resilience and diversification are more important than ever, we can’t afford to overlook it. https://lnkd.in/gTHhRiBQ

Most companies still think of academic collaboration as 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩. That’s not what the most productive collaborations are. When a company works with an academic researcher, it’s practicing 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, whether it calls it that or not. I’ve been reading a lot about Open Innovation lately after Tanya Ramond, PhD MBA recommended the book 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀 by Henry Chesbrough to me. There is a core insight in the book that stood out to me. Companies who intend to innovate need to realize that 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮. So, is there a way they might access some of the smart people they can't hire as employees? Absolutely! Universities are where a lot of those smart people live. Academic researchers have the freedom to explore ideas that companies might not yet be able to justify bringing in-house until some of the risk has been retired and open questions answered.  Also, academic researchers work at the edges of what’s known. They often see problems coming before markets do, because companies are focused on getting solutions to customers. Seen through an Open Innovation lens, an academic collaborator becomes an external source of discovery. They are a valuable domain specialist who can explore poorly defined questions and try risky ideas. Academic collaboration is Open Innovation in practice, not philanthropy. _____________________________ 📌 Want to learn more? My company TurningScience has recently completed an extensive research project on how to build transformational academia-industry partnerships. We’ve released a white paper titled 𝗕𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲: 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗔𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗮-𝗜𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀 that reveals our findings and outlines a 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽-𝗯𝘆-𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 for approaching potential partners and structuring win-win relationships. This paper is 40 pages of insights from 17 industry executives, R&D directors, and university leaders across 3 continents. Get it here: https://lnkd.in/gizdZYTd #AcademiaIndustryPartnerships #IndustryResearchPartnerships

Over the past year or two, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with innovation ecosystems through our Strategy Hub Qatar projects, an area that has increasingly captured my interest, particularly for the potential it holds to drive real-world impact. What I’ve noticed is an under-tapped opportunity to further strengthen these ecosystems by anchoring them in demand-led, partnership-driven innovation, where startups are not building in isolation, but are closely linked to clearly defined industry needs. When large industry players are engaged as active problem owners and potential adopters, the dynamic becomes far more powerful. Startups are able to design solutions that are grounded in real, validated challenges and closely aligned with operational realities. In this context, design thinking helps anchor innovation in real user needs, encouraging early testing and iteration to shape solutions that are practical and implementable. The real opportunity lies in creating a clear pathway from solution to adoption, where ideas are not only developed, but tested, refined, and ultimately taken forward by those they are designed for. This makes innovation more targeted, more responsive to local needs, and far more likely to scale. There is a compelling opportunity to deepen this model by fostering more intentional partnerships between industry and startups, creating a more connected, closed-loop system where challenges inform innovation, and innovation feeds directly back into industry. In this model, large players benefit from agile, locally developed solutions, while startups gain clearer pathways to adoption and scale. Realizing this potential requires embedding the right enabling mechanisms within these partnerships, particularly procurement and funding models that support experimentation, iteration, and ultimately, implementation. #InnovationEcosystems #PublicPrivatePartnerships #StartupEcosystem #IndustryPartnerships #DesignThinking

🌐 Introducing Our New White Paper: “Agentic AI–Powered Partnership and Licensing Frameworks for Open Innovation in Healthcare & Life Sciences” Healthcare innovation is accelerating faster than the systems designed to manage it. While AI, genomics, and digital therapeutics redefine what’s possible, the way organizations collaborate, license, and scale new discoveries remains fragmented — slowed by manual coordination and disconnected intelligence. This new white paper presents a solution: 🔹 The Agentic AI–Powered Partnership Framework – orchestrating scientific and clinical collaborations through autonomous reasoning agents. 🔹 The Agentic AI–Powered Licensing Framework – transforming the economics of technology transfer and deal-making into a transparent, evidence-driven process. Together, these frameworks establish a cognitive infrastructure that connects discovery to delivery — transforming open innovation from a series of transactions into a self-learning ecosystem that senses, reasons, acts, and optimizes across science, regulation, and commerce. 📈 Key outcomes from proof-of-concept simulations: 60% faster due diligence and partnership formation ±15% valuation precision (vs. ±40% industry norm) 75% fewer post-deal compliance deviations 5× higher knowledge reuse across alliances By integrating cognition, transparency, and adaptive governance, the Agentic AI Framework redefines how the global health-innovation economy collaborates — enabling organizations to innovate faster, fairer, and with accountable intelligence. #AgenticAI #OpenInnovation #LifeSciences #DigitalHealth #Biopharma #Licensing #AIinHealthcare #Innovation #Healthcare