Creating levers of management: Project management as an instigator of value creation in different stages of university-industry collaborations

This paper reports a longitudinal multi-case research project encompassing 72 semi-structured interviews carried out in 2011 and 2012. The interviews covered topics of the collaboration type, the initiation of the collaboration and details concerning the planning of the collaborations. In addition the interviews focused on the relationships between the people involved and as such also on the effects of project management. We distinguish between project management success and project success and try to identify best practices according to which dimensions such practices must distinguish themselves from non-best practices. The paper concludes that whereas project management success was not found to be causally related to project success, there seems to be a clearer link between project management success and to ensuring effective use of resources in both companies and universities. There is also evidence to the fact that it is problematic when corporate managers think they can run research projects like lean-based production companies.