Overcoming the Challenges of Collaborative Research for Sustainability: Managing Institutional Complexity

Achieving societal goals of sustainability will require businesses to leverage scientific results and advanced technologies and thereby promote the distribution of new solutions in society. Therefore, a key recommendation from the sustainability transition literature is to promote direct collaboration between industry and academia. However, existing research suggests that successful collaboration is difficult to achieve due to institutional complexity. This paper applies a set of theoretical concepts regarding institutional complexity—namely hybrid organizations, academic engagement, and institutional logics—to a case study of a university–industry centre for sustainability. The longitudinal process of collaboration from initiating to dismantling a centre is first described. This process understanding enables an analysis of the management challenges with regard to the different institutional logics held by stakeholders including financiers, firms and research institutions, as they attempt to work together to achieve desired sustainable innovation outcomes. The conclusions point out a novel capability—latent flexibility—that we have identified in hybrid organizations. This refers to where institutional and task complexity are dynamically resolved by managers preserving the ability to reconfigure a project’s assets and hence determine how logics should recede or advance depending on interpretations of achieved outputs and shifting expectations for collaborative research.