Science-With-Business: Improving Innovation and Competitiveness in SMEs

In a fast-changing global market both universities and industry are being pressured to stay competitive and to foster innovation, technology change and to answer to economic and societal challenges. In this knowledge economy scenario, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) have an important role once they represent 99% of all businesses in the European Union (EU) and are the main source of innovation. However, this SMEs have less capabilities to stay competitive in a sustainable way and have less access to talent and innovation in a systematic way. University-industry collaborations can contribute to improve SMEs competitiveness and innovation, through knowledge transfer and knowledge co-creation, increasing future jobs, contributing to the sustainability, stimulating economic growth and increasing living standards. The potential of value creation of university-industry collaboration has led researchers all over the world to study these forms of partnerships, especially in the last years. This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of the university-industry collaboration phenomena and to provide an iteration model that can be applied to Portuguese SMEs in order to allow these businesses to maintain and/or increase their cooperation with higher education institutions and to enhance their absorptive capabilities. The methodology used will be a qualitative research design with a multiple methods approach, namely semistructured interviews, in-depth interviews, a survey and several case studies. In terms of originality, this research contributes to enhance the discussion around the difficulty off collaboration university-industry and to demonstrate the value and relevance of knowledge-based capital for SMEs' innovation and competitiveness. The limitations of this research are related to the fact that this is still on an early stage and although the contemporaneity of the topic, the knowledge has not yet been consolidated and the theory is still not consensual.