Measuring Knowledge Translation in Academic / Industry Collaborations

As manufacturing and resource-based industries face growing challenges, Canadas future increasingly depends on advances in and sustainability of knowledge organizations. Knowledge-based workers comprise a growing proportion of the workforce today. More often than not, they work in the context of large-scale expert networks, spanning across different disciplines and organizations. They rely on software technologies for their discipline-specific activities, the coordination of their activities, and their communication with each other. This type of networked interdisciplinary work is motivated by the belief that the complex problems of our time can be effectively addressed only through such broad collaborations of experts and partners who can act as knowledge receptors to create value through new products and services, based on the work outputs. However, even as this belief is generally, and increasingly, shared, the questions of when, why, and precisely how these research networks are made effective are still very much open and the subject of considerable debate. We aim to study an existing, long-standing collaborative research network (the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies) to build an understanding of the relationships between collaboration, innovation and knowledge translation.

Faculty Supervisor:

Kelly Lyons

Student:

Yunpeng Li

Partner:

IBM Canada

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Toronto