Análise da gestão de projetos colaborativos de inovação entre universidades e empresas.

Abstract

The strategies used by companies to promote innovations have significantly changed in recent years, especially when regarding the partnership with universities to develop collaborative projects. Businesses and universities’ knowledge, in order to facilitate the interaction between institutions, requires new actions to streamline and professionalize the process. Concerning the need to optimize the allocation of spendable resources and also to diminish risks by companies and universities in research, development and innovation, is possible to observe a growing and justified concern within the qualification of collaborative projects’ management, through the application of adequate tools and practices. The study aims to propose a best practices guide for the management of collaborative innovation projects between universities and companies. The literature review was essentially based in Davenport, Davies and Grimes (1998), Moro-Valentin, Montoro-Sanchez, Guerra-Martin (2003), Barnes, Pashby and Gibbons (2006) and Albertin and Amaral (2010), that searched for best practices and critical success factors in collaborative research projects between universities and companies. As a methodological procedure, was realized a descriptive research through multiple case study with a qualitative approach. The selection of the study cases was carried out by selection and intentionality, constituting four cases of university-company collaborative projects, two of them considered successfully managed and the other two unsuccessfully managed. Semi-structured interviews were realized with managers, entrepreneurs and researchers involved in each project, guided by a specific roadmap, in order to meet the objectives of the study. Regarding the results found in the research, were identified management practices in collaborative projects that reinforce national and international literature, been them: setting clear and realistic goals, clearly defined responsibilities, making clear contractual arrangements and the practice of effective communication. Apart from these, were also identified new practices: the need to maintain personal contact between partners, the systematic data recording of the project, conducting an opening meeting to formalize and disseminate information about the project, conducting regular meetings of monitoring, access to a software or a project management platform and having well-defined processes of the project management sector. From the gather of these practices, a guide containing ten best practices for the management of collaborative projects between University-Company was proposed.