Environments for Joint University-Industry Laboratories (JUIL): Micro-level dimensions and research implications

Societal demands for innovations to address market opportunities while simultaneously generating positive human capability impacts has radically transformed how innovation is organised. This new turn has focused attention of scholars, policy makers, and practitioners to exploring the potential of Joint University-Industry Laboratories (JUIL) to generating impact from university research through knowledge and technology transfer to industry. Although there is considerable scholarly work on the environmental conditions necessary to support JUIL, specific conditions that foster the identification of opportunities for innovation in JUIL at the micro-level remains unclear. Emphasising the persistence, but also transience nature of the context within which JUIL operate, we synthesize diverse literature streams on university-industry collaborations, and the conditions in which they are induced to explicate an integrative framework that specifies how the three distinct but interrelated dimensions: individuals, processes and interaction, and structure, may drive the development of successful JUIL. We go further to present a set of propositions constituting a contribution and outline the implications of our study for the theory and practice of managing and formulating policies to developing conducive environments for JUIL.