Affiliations 

  • 1 UCSI University
  • 2 Universiti Utara Malaysia
  • 3 University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
MyJurnal

Abstract

Collaboration without performance measures is likened to a football game without a scoreboard. Traditionally, universities have operated in isolation industry and vice versa. University and industry were formed with different agenda and objectives. Fundamentally, a university is a nonprofit oriented organisation while industry is profit oriented. However, industrialisation and egalitarian awakening in the early 20'" century gradually brought university and industry together. Currently, university and industry are increasingly seeking avenues to collaborate strategically. Nevertheless, 50% to 70% of collaborative efforts fail prematurely due to the lack of performance measures. In light of that, there is a need to search for a set of holistic performance measures. Therefore, this study is undertaken to determine the performance measures of strategic university industry collaborations in Malaysia using dyadic multicases approach. The researcher analyses multiple cases from the perspectives of university and industry within a bounded system via qualitative research methodology. Interviews respondents were from university and industry. From the 68 interviews conducted, university and industry respondents shared their experiences on the need for performance measures to include trust, commitment, enterprise, communication, complementary, flexibility, commercialisation and resources on top of conventional performance measures like agreed objectives, timelines, financial indicators and reporting. With that, a set of holistic performance measures is established from interviews. The main contributions of the research findings are: (i) to policy-making for the Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia; and (ii) to the body of knowledge in investigating the performance measures in satisfactory performance of strategic university-industry collaboration.