Staging referential alignment in industrial–academic collaboration

This chapter documents the transformation of intermediary objects into boundary objects acting as a center stage for technological development in an industrial-academic collaboration. We invoke the staging metaphor to sensitize readers to the ongoing work that practitioners put into constituting, configuring and transforming diverse material and epistemic conditions towards creating and maintaining a referential infrastructure across different situated settings. We draw on Dominique Vinck (2011) to consider the ‘equipping of intermediary objects’ and how this shapes collective work. We also extend the ‘innovation science notion’ of Joakim Juhl (2016), that accounts for how academic science is converted into a service for commercial interests of private actors, to encompass the staging of a more omni-directional service relationship between diverse academic and industrial partners.