Research collaborations between academia and industry

The rapid and complex research and innovation processes require high-tech companies to optimize their technology transfer processes. It is clearly not sufficient to solely rely on internal R&D; strategic cooperations with external research centers of excellence are needed in order to compete in the global innovation market. Candidates for such strategic cooperations are universities, research institutions, and technology focused consulting companies. Key challenge is the effective integration of external competences into the company-internal innovation processes. In this paper we present a survey of the state-of-the-art in technology transfer, high-light promising success cases for the future, and derive success criteria for successful technology transfer in a global world. The cooperation between Siemens and Fraunhofer IESE is presented as a concrete example.