Research partnerships between business researchers and industry

We study the strategic behaviour of management researchers when establishing research partnerships with industry. To this end we developed a framework distinguishing ‘strategic planned’ and ‘opportunity-driven’ behaviour in the process of establishing and managing research partnerships. We also explore how researchers deal with influence of firms on their research. Specifically, we focus on the tension be-tween autonomy of researchers and influence from an industry research partner in setting research direc-tions and producing scientifically reliable and publishable knowledge. The main conclusion from the analysis of the strategic behaviour of management researchers is that re-searchers in our sample have a high need for sharing resources with industry and at the same time they are autonomous when setting research directions in joint projects with industry. One of the major observa-tions in this study is that researchers have to give up their autonomy to a certain extent when accepting the terms of collaboration with industry, but they have a high need for autonomy when deciding about research directions and execution of research. Even though they need to seek external funding, it is their choice to enter a specific relationship with industry and accept restrictions on their autonomy. We present data and an analysis of the strategic behaviour of researchers in different phases of research partnerships.