Building a Distributed Web-Based Research and Innovation Ecosystem for University-Industry Partnership

Introduction

University-Industry Partnership (UIP) has been considered to be very essential to creating innovation that meets business objectives in developing and commercializing universities (Burbridge and Morrison, 2021). This is largely due to the strategic role of the academia in leading technology creation and transfer, which has led to the increase in collaborations between Universities and Industries (Giones, 2019). These collaborations between Universities and Industries have resulted in an Innovation Ecosystem defined as a community of people and institutions in constant collaboration with policies and resources to promote the translation of new ideas into products, processes and services (Cantu-Ortiz, 2015). Reciprocal communication between the Universities and Industry has been identified as very effective in establishing positive expectations among partners (Bstieler et al., 2017). Building a research and innovation ecosystem becomes very essential as it provides an environment for Universities and Industries to collaborate with the goal of producing mutually desired outcomes. In this vein, national and international research conventions have accepted the fact that multidimensional innovations for the future should significantly rely on distributed research collaborations that consist of sharing and integration of data, resources and knowledge, remote collaborative access to scientific instruments, and pooled human expertise (Hey et al., 2009). Therefore, an improvement in the capacity for research in Universities to drive innovation will enable researchers to compete with other countries in today’s global village (Nwakpa, 2015). Unfortunately, knowledge transfer through UIPs has faced significant challenges due to weaknesses in the area of collaboration and communication between universities and industries and therefore promoting effective communication should be emphasized (Marinho et al., 2020; Yusuf, 2012). The “European paradox”, which refers to having a strong capacity for research and yet lacking the capacity to translate it into innovative products, perfectly describes this challenge (Ranga et al., 2013).

Research has shown that deploying web-based platforms for collaborative research can significantly support technology creation and transfer activities in academia (Brody, 2017; Eteng and Oladimeji, 2019). This implies that a web-based research and innovation ecosystem will enhance multidisciplinary interaction between lecturers and students, which will translate to increased productivity in research collaboration processes. Distributed computing has transformed the University landscape making collaborative research possible and creating more opportunities for universities to implement systems comprising of new sets of structures that can be accessed through the Internet (Boronenko & Alexandrov, 2009). A distributed computer system has been defined as an assembly of autonomous computing components (van Steen & Tanenbaum, 2016). This chapter is aimed at developing a web-based tool that supports collaborative research involving researchers and industry players to promote innovation using distributed computing. This was done by embarking on requirement gathering from the research arms of selected Universities for appropriate system modelling through an interview; developing a distributed database for University-Industry partnership using MySQL; developing a web-based groupware that supports seamless Academia-Industry partnership and implementing a system testing procedure to validate the collaborative system developed while ensuring that it can be adopted by Universities and Industries to promote research and innovation.