The Contribution of Academic Staff to Promote Open Innovation in Sri Lanka: With Reference to Management Faculties of Selected State Universities in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Organizations directly welcome university research outputs for their development. Recently many organizations have been established in collaboration with educational institutions such as universities. The collaboration between universities and industries is critical for skill development, the generation, acquisition, and adoption of knowledge (Innovation and knowledge transfer) and the promotion of entrepreneurship. Further, open innovative environmental and industrial issues should be addressed by university researchers, in which research output may be a form of new product, service or business process improvement that can be commercialized through patent and licensing. In this knowledge exchange process, academics who are deemed as a strategic group of this innovation process should take the lead. Hence, the study was directed to identify the contribution of academic staff to promote open innovation in Sri Lanka. Here, research partnership and research service, commercialization of intellectual property, informal knowledge transfer and productivity publication were important dimensions of academic contribution. The study was limited to the academic staff of Management Faculties in state universities and 300 academics were reached randomly for data collection. It represents the Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka, University of Kelaniya, University of Peradeniya and University of Ruhuna. A self-administrated questionnaire was utilized for the purpose. Descriptive statistics, correlation and regression tests were conducted on purified data set for testing hypotheses. The light of the correlation has proved four statistically significant correlations between all independent variables and the dependent variable; however, regression has rejected the impact of research partnership and productivity publication on the open innovation in Sri Lanka. Accordingly, commercialization of intellectual property and informal knowledge transfer have promoted open innovation of the Sri Lanka. Hence, the university should develop a mechanism to commercialize its scientific findings and facilitate for informal knowledge transfer process between university and industry for the development of the collaboration of those two.