University-Industry-Collaborations in Egypt: Academics’ Perception of Motivators and Success Factors

In today’s knowledge-based economies immense attention has been given to the links between industry and academia. Industries have increasingly realized the value from forging strong ties with universities and are constantly seeking strategic alliances in order to enhance their competitiveness and gain a stronger knowledge base. The Egyptian government has reaffirmed its intentions on boosting national innovation levels and has placed university-industry collaborations amongst its top priorities. While Egypt does have a considerably robust industrial sector, its potential in fostering innovation and technological development will remain hampered if policy makers remain unaware of the knowledge transfer channels in Egypt and the researchers who take part in them. This study sheds light and examines University-industry partnerships in Egypt. A three-pronged approach was used where data on 62 collaborations from 7 different academic institutes was collected and analysed, 45 survey responses were gathered from researchers affiliated to 6 different universities and 4 in-depth qualitative interviews were carried out with academics with previous experience in university-industry collaborations. This investigational study explores some of the collaborations that Egyptian universities have forged with industry, the characteristics of their researchers and their perceived contextual success factors. The findings reveal that there is untapped potential for UICs across many diverse sectors in industry. Egyptian collaborations although limited in number, however, are capable of producing innovative outputs that depend on bi-directional knowledge flows with industry. Researcher seniority and academic rank are considered big determinants for successful partnerships with industry, suggesting the need to come up with polices that can encourage younger faculty who seem to be preoccupied by career progression over investing time in industry collaborations. What appears to stand in the way of universities from developing strong research partnerships that can contribute to national innovation and economic growth is lacking incentive structures for academics, poor upper management support from university heads, informal frameworks to manage these collaborations and minimal skills and resources dedicated to supporting academic entrepreneurship and commercialization. Policy efforts should aim at fostering an entrepreneurial culture on university campuses, that support and help faculty make stronger ties with industry. Encouraging University- Industry Collaborations in a transitional country like Egypt is not an easy task. Policy makers need to draw upon the insights collected from this study in addition to calling for more exploratory research in this area involving all stakeholders, external environment endowments and all phases of the knowledge- transfer cycle