Pillars in Parallel: How to Create Genuine Collaboration to Achieve Innovation Ecosystem Outcomes
- Dr John H Howard
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
John H. Howard, 2 December 2025
Modern economic, industrial, and socio-cultural innovation strategies rely heavily on the performance of innovation ecosystems. These are the dynamic networks of organisations, individuals, and resources intended to accelerate economic growth and well-being by capturing the benefits of technological progress.
In this ecosystem context, the actual and potential relationships and interactions among businesses, universities, and governments have become known as the triple helix effect. But, notwithstanding all the policy attention and investment ecosystems receive, many stall behind the challenge of generating close collaboration among the major players.
At the heart of this challenge are the ecosystem's three institutional pillars: universities, industry, and government. Through the lens of institutional sociology, we must recognise that these institutions are much more than structures; each embodies distinct, deeply held attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, expressed through historically developed missions, rules, and value systems. Their unique cultures are not accidental.
These differences must be embraced and respected. Each pillar operates independently, but in parallel, running alongside each other but rarely converging. Attempts at collaboration frequently fail to honour their core, legitimate purposes. It follows that achieving a productive collaborative platform requires a clear-eyed understanding of each pillar's fundamentally different institutional drivers.
Other institutional pillars, such as the church, can also exert immense influence, shaping the underlying attitudes and beliefs that inform our modern secular institutions.
The University Pillar: Driven by Knowledge and Eminence
Universities exist to create, expand, and disseminate knowledge. This purpose shapes their entire (espoused) operational model. Its orientation is necessarily towards autonomy, process, and academic procedure, all designed to protect the integrity of its core functions: education, research, and community outreach. This is not a business preference; it is a cultural identity, often enshrined in university enabling legislation and university statutes.
University accountability rests with independent governing councils, not shareholders, and to governments on specific-purpose financial assistance and an increasing range of statutory requirements covering matters such as the workplace, foreign interference, ethics, and freedom of speech. But the ultimate accountability lies with the public trust.
Universities have to demonstrate value beyond financial statements and prove their contribution to national capability. This requires navigating the tension between institutional autonomy and the pragmatic expectations of taxpayers. It is a governance challenge demanding far more than ticking regulatory boxes.
Metrics like research income, patents, citations, global rankings, and the quality of the student experience are used to indicate success. These key performance indicators directly influence behaviour, prioritising eminence, international reputation, and scholarly output.
This culture logically results in a low appetite for risk. When commercial opportunities are assessed, they are viewed through the lens of potential disruption to core missions, reputational hazard, or procedural non-compliance. This cautious, methodical nature stands in sharp contrast to the industry pillar.
From the perspective of potential industry partners, this institutional character can be frustrating. Business leaders often perceive universities as slow, complex, and unrealistic in commercial negotiations. They may see Research Offices and Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) as difficult to deal with, or academics as more interested in scholarly publication than in delivering commercial value. They sense that incentives are skewed away from real-world results.
These perceptions result from a cultural collision. Industry may find university IP policies difficult, overheads excessive, or contracts overly complex. This friction arises because the university is not structured as a simple "research provider" within a procurement model. Its purpose is broader, encompassing education, problem-solving, and acting as a "public space" for networks and social interaction.
The Industry Pillar: Driven by Customers and Results
Industry's purpose is refreshingly direct: to create and retain customers. This pillar is the primary engine of economic development, driving the production and sale of goods and services. Many would argue that industry, not government, creates sustainable jobs. Its orientation is therefore firmly on outputs, results, and securing a return on investment (ROI). In a shorthand sense, purpose is often defined by a motivation to make profits.
Accountability is to boards, shareholders, and, somewhat perversely, to market analysts. Success is measured by unambiguous KPIs: sales, market share, and share price. This commercial imperative demands a high appetite for risk. Entrepreneurship is an exercise in managing uncertainty for potential gain. Businesses have to invest in new capacity and capabilities (innovation) to win and retain customers, responding dynamically to market shifts and demographic changes.
This drive for results informs industry's view of its partners. From a university perspective, a profit motive can appear untrustworthy. Academics may worry that business partners will compromise their academic independence, a fear highlighted by controversies in sectors like pharmaceuticals or big sugar.
Universities often feel that businesses do not understand the cost of research or the long-term nature of discovery. They may perceive industry as taking a "K-Mart approach" to acquiring knowledge, treating it as a cheap commodity. Businesses may also bypass formal channels such as a Research Office or a TTO, preferring to deal directly with academics (and in the process, exposing the university to unmanaged risks). These tensions are symptoms of the same institutional gap.
The Government Pillar: Driven by Policy and Probity
The government pillar's mission is to deliver economic growth, employment, price stability, and social justice. It operates by developing and implementing efficient and effective policies and programs, and its orientation is necessarily toward rules, regulations, and compliance. This bureaucratic nature is designed to ensure fairness, accountability, and the proper use of public funds.
Government is accountable to the legislature and, ultimately, to voters. These days, the key indicators are voter sentiment, public integrity, and the ability to maintain balanced budgets. This creates a high level of public-facing scrutiny from numerous integrity bodies, auditors, and the media. Government's appetite for risk is typically moderate to low.
This pillar sets the macroeconomic conditions and addresses market failures by investing in public goods, including economic and social infrastructure, education, culture, sport and recreation, and national research capabilities. It develops industry and innovation policies to build competitive advantage, often by "picking winners" in strategic sectors.
From the perspective of universities and industry, government can be an inconsistent partner. Currently, both may feel that government has lost interest in long-term national innovation policy. They might observe an obsession with startups at the expense of scaling existing firms or see a politicisation of grant programs.
A common complaint is that government adopts a "funding" rather than an "investment" mindset. Programs are often short-term (three-year cycles), fragmented across multiple agencies, and offer small commitments. This creates uncertainty and drives an industry of grant writers, rather than building long-term capability.
The Challenge of Institutional Drift
This analysis is complicated when institutions lose sight of their foundational missions. This "institutional drift" sees pillars adopt the behaviours of others, creating new layers of complexity and confusion. While this can sometimes be adaptive, it often muddies the water for potential partners.
Universities, for example, are often pressured to become more "entrepreneurial." This drive can shift focus from long-term knowledge creation to short-term commercial wins. It creates internal conflict and confuses industry partners, who are left unsure if they are engaging with a research entity or a nascent competitor.
Conversely, many great businesses become great philanthropists, funding public goods and social programs. This positive expression of corporate citizenship can be an enormous asset. However, it can also blur the lines, as partners must discern between genuine altruism and a long-term strategic investment disguised as such.
Government, too, can drift. An ideological commitment to "new public management," for instance, attempts to remake public service in a corporate image. This can lead to a focus on "customers" and market efficiencies, potentially undermining the core mission of ensuring probity, equity, and addressing systemic market failures.
This blurring of boundaries makes genuine collaboration even more difficult. Partners must now navigate not only the distinct foundational cultures but also their inconsistent, "drifted" personas. It underscores the difficulty of finding alignment when the pillars themselves are unsure of their own roles.
These three pillars, each legitimate and necessary, operate with distinct missions, timelines, risk profiles, and reward systems. The university's timeline is long, its risk profile low, and its reward is eminence. Industry's timeline is short, its risk profile high, and its reward is profit. Government's timeline is electoral, its risk profile is low, and its reward is public stability.
This misalignment is the core challenge. The resulting friction, mistrust, and misunderstanding are what keep the pillars operating in parallel. They are all active in the same economic space, but they are not working together. Genuine collaboration cannot be mandated in this environment; it must be built.
Building the Bridge: From Transactions to Partnerships
This evolution from a transaction relationship to a strategic partnership between the pillars rarely happens spontaneously. The institutional and cultural gaps are too wide to bridge without a dedicated mechanism. As we have argued often, this creates the need for specialist "ecosystem integrators."
These individuals or organisations act as intermediaries, brokers, and translators. They primarily bridge the institutional divides. They must be "multilingual," speaking the distinct languages of academia (eminence, process), industry (profit, speed), and government (probity, policy).
The integrator's role is to build the foundations for trust. They do this by identifying the shared interests and potential mutual benefits that may be invisible to the pillars themselves. They are accountable for the process of collaboration. They facilitate the development of clear principles, flexible agreement protocols, and governance structures that respect the core missions of all parties.
By managing these complex interactions, the ecosystem integrator de-risks the collaboration for everyone. They absorb friction, manage expectations, and maintain momentum. They are the essential component that helps move the pillars from parallel operation to a genuinely integrated platform, enabling the entire ecosystem to achieve its innovation outcomes.
This journey can be understood in three phases:
The Transactional relationship. This is a simple, immediate exchange: an IP licence, a service contract, or a competitive grant. The orientation is "sales and marketing." It is about a deal. This "knowledge transfer" approach is common, but it builds little lasting alignment or trust.
Collaboration and Cooperation. This is a medium-term, reciprocal relationship that requires senior management buy-in. Examples include multi-year Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs), joint research institutes, and formal partnership agreements. The orientation is "engagement and commitment." It begins to build the mutual understanding, shared language, and trust necessary for greater things. State Governments have introduced centralised coordination arrangements, such as the Melbourne Innovation Districts Initiative and the South Australia Innovation Places Framework,
The Partnership relationship. This is a long-term, formal, and strategic integration. It involves creating unified structures such as unincorporated joint ventures, incorporated management organisations, local (metropolitan) governments, or state government development corporations. In all cases, the orientation should be "integration and obligation," with a shared focus on outcomes. This is the hardest to achieve, but it is where the pillars are truly unified by a common strategic goal.
The foundation for all effective engagement is trust. It is a fundamental precept of human interactions that "people do business with [relate to] people they trust." This requires a deliberate and sustained investment in social capital. Collaboration is not a single event; it is an evolutionary process. Relationships must be guided from simple transactions toward deep, integrated partnerships.
A Concluding Insight: The Uniqueness of Place
Institutional frameworks are not universal. They are unique expressions of national and regional history, law, and political economy. Brief characterisations of institutional frameworks for countries that are often cited as models for Australia are outlined below:
China: "State-directed, tech-giant-fueled, and strategically-aligned research." The framework is defined by strong, top-down government 5-year plans, massive state investment, and the deep integration of rapidly growing national tech giants.
Germany: "Applied-research-integrated, Mittelstand-driven, and regionally-supported." This framework is built on a tight integration between industry and a large network of applied research institutes (like Fraunhofer), a powerful backbone of specialist small-to-medium enterprises (Mittelstand), and strong support from regional state (Länder) governments.
Israel: "Military-integrated, VC-fueled, and university-anchored." This ecosystem is well-known for the tight integration between compulsory military service (especially technical units), a dense venture capital market, and strong research universities.
Japan: "Keiretsu-led, state-coordinated, and long-term R&D-focused." This framework is characterised by large, bank-centred industrial groups (Keiretsu) that prioritise long-term, internal R&D and process quality, in close coordination with government ministries.
South Korea: "Chaebol-dominated, state-partnered, and applied-research-focused." This ecosystem is overwhelmingly driven by a few massive industrial conglomerates (Chaebols) that have a deep, collaborative, and historically guided relationship with government.
Silicon Valley: "Venture-capital-fueled, university-spun, and entrepreneur-led." This regional framework is defined by a dense, competitive network of private venture capital, a strong cultural link to elite research universities (like Stanford) for talent and spin-outs, and a culture that lionises serial entrepreneurship.
Taiwan: "State-architected, institute-driven, and semiconductor-specialised." This is a highly strategic framework in which the government created and funded a central research institute (ITRI) to actively develop and transfer technology to a specialised, globally dominant industry (semiconductors).
UK: "Elite-university-anchored, finance-fueled, and catapult-connected." This framework relies heavily on world-leading elite universities (e.g., Oxford, Cambridge, and London) for basic research, a strong financial services sector in London for venture capital, and a network of government-backed "Catapult" centres to bridge the gap to industry.
These brief characterisations can explain why policymaker attempts to "copy and paste" an innovation ecosystem from one jurisdiction to another invariably fail. An ecosystem cannot be imported; it must be grown organically from the institutional soil in which it is planted. This requires respecting the specific, local character of its university, industry, and government pillars. Lasting collaboration can be built only by understanding and aligning with the institutions that are already in place.
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