Different cognitive styles in the academy-industry collaboration

Abstract

Previous studies on obstacles in technology transfer between universities and companies emphasized the economic, legal, and organizational aspects, mainly focused in transfer of patents and licences. Since research collaboration implies a complex phenomenon of linguistic and cognitive coordination and attuning among members of the research group, a deeper cognitive investigation about this dimension might give some interesting answer to academy-industry problem. The main hypothesis is that there can be different cognitive styles in thinking, problem solving, reasoning and decision making that can hamper the collaboration between academic and industrial researchers. These different cognitive styles are linked and mostly determined by a different set of values and norms that are part of background knowledge. Different background knowledge is also responsible of bad linguistic coordination and understanding and of the difficulty of a successful psychology of group. The general hypotheses that will be inferred in this paper represent a research programme of empirical tests to control the effects on cognitive styles of different scientific and technological domains and geographical contexts. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.