Long-term innovation outcomes of university-industry collaborations: the role of ‘bridging’ vs ‘blurring’ boundary spanning practices

We explore the link between the long-term innovation outcomes of university-industry collaborations (UICs) - in particular, whether the UIC has led to further exploitative or exploratory innovation - and the adoption of boundary spanning practices. This extends the current literature on UICs, which has mainly focused on short-term innovation outputs and on the features of boundary spanning individuals and teams. Relying on a unique, purposefully constructed evidence base combining information from 95 semi-structured interviews with participants in 75 UICs and from publicly available databases, we find that adopting a ‘bridging’ approach to boundary spanning – through formal and structured practices and communication procedures – increases the likelihood that the UIC will lead to further exploitative innovation. A ‘blurring’ approach to boundary spanning – through informal practices to de-emphasise boundaries between organisations – increases the likelihood that the UIC will lead to further exploratory innovation. The choice of each boundary spanning approach is in turn influenced by the collaborators’ prior experience with internal knowledge creation and collaborative knowledge co-creation. Management and policy implications are discussed.