Objectives, agreements and matching in science-industry collaborations: reassembling the pieces of the puzzle

Science-industry collaborations have been the subject of a considerable attention in the last few years. The paper argues that, however, the existing studies are still restricted to a partial view of the phenomenon. In this respect, our study departs from the specialised literature by taking into consideration, for a given set of heterogeneous collaborations, information from both the academics' and the firms' side, relative to their characteristics, their aims and the collaboration settings. To do so, we constructed a database of 46 collaborations from original data we collected, in several European countries and in the US, within the SESI-TSER project. The first outcome of our study is a typology of science-industry collaborations built on a formal procedure (a multi-correspondence analysis followed by an ascendant hierarchical classification) exhibiting five coherent types of collaborations that we describe precisely. Highlighting the crucial importance of research agendas, we thus propose a simple rationale for the matching process. The latter leads us to propose an "assortative" matching hypothesis generating two polar configurations which we test and confirm. Finally, we examine the policy implications of the findings. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.