Beyond complementarity and substitutability? Understanding relational governance and formal contracts in university-industry collaborations for innovation
基于对大学学者的调查，采用模糊集定性比较分析，发现产学研合作中关系治理与正式合同的组合因合作类型而异：上游研究依赖两者结合或仅关系治理，而衍生企业设立则需两者结合，正式合同始终是核心。
Despite recent attention in the literature on the governance of inter-organisational relationships to a process perspective, existing literature tends to neglect the heterogeneity between parties and the various paths and outcomes through which organisations manage to work together towards agreed goals and overcome their conflicts and contradictions. Inter-organisational collaborations for innovation (and university-industry collaborations in particular) involve many trade-offs and a complex process of joint problem-solving and knowledge transfer. We draw on an original survey of university academics and their collaborations for innovation with industry , and employ a configuration approach and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the interrelated and complex dynamics. We find that in university-industry collaborations aimed at upstream research involving novel scientific knowledge, where goals and deliverables are ambiguous and uncertain, two mechanisms support the collaboration. These include, first, a combination of relational governance and formal contracts and, second, relational governance alone. In contrast, in collaborations for the setting up of spin-offs, where goals and deliverables are specific and clear, only a combination of relational governance and formal contracts supports the collaborations. Formal contracts are always core to facilitating such collaborations. We uncover how different dimensions of relational governance are conducive to the development of, and knowledge transfer in, the different types of collaborations in combination with formal contracts. We thus go beyond debates over the complementarity or substitutability of relational governance and formal contracts in inter-organisational collaborations by exploring in more detail the nature, paths and outcomes of such relationships. We also contribute to extending the university-industry collaboration literature by showing the governance conditions associated with knowledge exchange attributes of different types and phases of university-industry collaborations.