What is University-Industry Partnership

Universities are considered the main sources of innovation; yet, in practice, their potential as collaboration partners in the scope of innovation creation is underexplored, being last mentioned by firms as collaborators. Moreover, firms' innovation policies tend to change their focus by driving success more often from collaboration with universities. Given the direct influence of quality of higher education on the capacity of the business sector to innovate, in this chapter the authors address the issue of collaborating with higher education institutions through open innovation by fostering university-industry collaboration and a more entrepreneurial mindset in universities. The authors offer evidence from European universities in order to illustrate the benefits of such partnerships and also the barriers that hamper the open innovation objectives by applying a risk management perspective. Furthermore, they explore with examples how Romanian universities take this path of collaboration.