ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with two points: the economics of technological change and the organizational missions and norms of universities. Any analytical or prescriptive assessment of the content of university-industry research and development (R&D) alliances is dependent upon a prior employment of a theory of technological innovation. Universities differ in their capabilities to perform research and in their institutional goals. At the aggregate level, universities can be said to have articulated missions, promulgated internal reward systems, and established organizational counterparts that correspond to the basic/applied developmental stages of the R&D process. The chapter offers a general conceptualization of the process of technological innovation, including a critique of the manner in which current treatments of collaborative relationships differentiate between "research" and "technology transfer". It describes the structural trends in the private sector and in universities related to research and development, and examines why and how bilateral arrangements has been entered into from among the multiple options available to each party.
