A theoretical view on public-private partnerships in research and innovation in Germany

Many case studies about public-private research partnerships (PPP) between academia and industry provide useful insights into the establishment and operation of these collaborative ties. Nevertheless, many of these studies follow their own perspective of analysis. According to Bozeman (2013: 312) "the scholarship on this topic remains relatively a theoretical or, more precisely, that it is "pre-theoretical" in the sense that much knowledge is accumulated but it has not been integrated into a matrix of empirical explanations". Taking the funding initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) "Research Campus - public-private partnership for innovation" (Forschungscampus - öffentlich-private Partnerschaft für Innovationen) as an example of a public-private partnership in research and innovation, it is the objective of this paper to develop a theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of this kind of PPP, and to apply this framework to the specific case of the German "Research Campus" initiative.