An advanced Model for University-Industry-Cooperation

In today’s environment the end-to-end cooperation within the triple-helix of universities, public institutions and industry partners is getting more and more important. So called intermediaries are playing a major role for innovation and knowledge transfer.

Source: The Pasteur’s Quadrant, A Revised Dynamic Model [Donald E. Stokes, 1997]

Above figure shows that there is a strong mutual interaction between Research on the one hand and Technology on the other.

University-industry-cooperation involves partners of different nature into interaction. Universities for the research side are typically public organizations, industrial firms for the technology side, are commercial organizations. Such Public-Private-Partnerships (as they are sometimes called), are feasible, however create the special institutional challenge of cooperation across the distinction between public, “not for profit” institutions and the commercial, “for profit” sector which can be only addressed by dedicated intermediaries as facilitators of the cooperation process.

Such cooperation has to meet national and international organizational and financial compliance standards of IAS, which is favoured in Europe, the US-GAAP Standard (www.usgaap.pro), and the OECD Guidelines.

novanda. as a commercial subsidiary of two university based Entrepreneurship Centers (CeTIM, UniBw Munich and SCE, University of Applied Sciences Munich) is getting involved when innovation projects mature into the commercialization phase. novanda. GmbH is a Munich-registered company with limited liability under German law and can act in the commercial sphere. In order to maintain durable close institutional linkages CeTIM and SCE are limited partners of novanda. Still novanda. is an independent legal entity in compliance with the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance (www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceprinciples/31557724.pdf, released in 2004) as both University partners are holding a share of not more than 40% in novanda., have no board seats, and thus no decisive influence in novanda.‘s business decisions. novanda., thus is an industrial firm offering an advanced industrial services Portfolio in the area of professional innovation management, strategy and entrepreneurship consulting.

By its set up novanda. is well integrated into the Munich innovation system 4Entrepreneurship and so is strongly networked within the Bavarian innovation system.

Below figure illustrates the main functions of a successful industry-university innovation system, the institutions that typically provide these functions, their main exchange relations and the position of intermediaries like novanda. in this innovation system.

#Innovation #Cooperation #University #Industry #Intermediaries #Education #Research #Business #CareerDevelopment