Understanding Proximity in Research Consortia : A case study of proximity dimensions within the AddLife Competence Centre

Today’s knowledge creation process has become extremely complex. On the one hand, technological innovation increasingly requires the use of complementary expertise from several apparently unrelated fields. On the other, the magnitude of the challenges that research and development present often require a large amount of resources that single actors can hardly achieve by themselves. For these reasons, the popularity of collaborative research has increased greatly in recent years. Among the many forms of collaborative research adopted today, research consortia are the most used. Given the steady increase of this trend, it has become important to understand the dynamics at play in research consortia. In particular, it is crucial to understand how participants interact with each other and the implication of such interactions on the success of a consortium’s outcome. The following study utilises a proximity-based framework to the single case study of the AddLife Competence Centre, an Uppsala University based R&D consortium for the development of Additive Manufacturing technology applied to Life Science. The data was collected by conducting eleven semi-structured interviews of AddLife participants. This study begins by presenting an overview of the literature on collaborative network, collaborative research and proximity. It moves onto analysing the interactions of actors in AddLife as a triple helix arrangement. Next, linkages between actors are expressed in terms of organisational, cognitive and social proximity. The analysis is discussed and presented as follows: uncertainty and discrepancies can lower organisational proximity, while the lack of goals alignment can lower cognitive proximity. High social proximity can mitigate the effects of both, especially in case of opportunistic behaviour. Acting on these three proximity dimensions should be prioritised over other proximity trade-offs