| Different cultures, different perspectives: the experiences of academic and government researchers in collaborative R&D centres (2005) | |||||||
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| In Australia, as elsewhere, research is increasingly being built around cross-sector (government, university, business) teams with well-defined socio-economic objectives. Novel organisational arrangements for collaborative research and development (R&D) are emerging that operate unlike academic departments or government laboratories. While the interests, objectives and strategies of the participants may variously converge or conflict, empirical data on the experiences of those engaged in cross-sector R&D are limited. The paper describes how two different groups - academic researchers on the one hand and employees of government research agencies on the other - perceive the rewards and risks of participation in Australia's Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) program. Evidence is drawn from a written survey of 370 respondents from public sector organisations involved in the management and conduct of CRC based research. Our findings suggest that while professionals in the university and government research sectors substantially agree on the value of the collaboration they are attracted by somewhat different benefits and may face rather different risks in their participation in the CRCs. In the universities, the risk of CRC engagement may be borne more by the individual than by the institution (which we term academic risk), whereas in the government laboratories, the risk is borne largely by the institution (termed organisational risk). The implication is that government research agencies and universities need to adopt differing responses in managing their participation in cross-sector R&D arrangements like the CRCs. | |||||||
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