Innovation Management in the Light of University-Industry Collaboration in Post-socialist Countries

During the last two decades university-industry relations have been shifted from sponsorship and donation based relationships to long-term strategic collaboration all over the world. In post-socialist countries this procedure took a different course than in the Western world. While the above mentioned topic has been becoming more and more popular throughout the past decades, qualities of managers and their best practices of the RDI spheres have not been investigated in post-socialist countries. This study aims to diminish this research gap, create new knowledge in the field of management and contribute with valuable evidence to the ongoing debate on RDI networking that could be applied in practice. Beside conducting a survey to identify preferred management types, structured interviews were carried out together with secondary data analysis in order to explore potential problem sources in U-I relations. The study investigated the perceptions of Hungarian and Russian actors of university-industry collaboration in order to determine whether their common socialist background is reflected in their way of thinking, and to define challenges and suggest solutions that could improve the efficiency of U-I collaboration. The main finding of the research is that in both countries the problems of U-I collaboration are similar, while the preferred management style, which is expected to treat these issues, differs in Russia and Hungary.