UICMM: A Maturity Model for University-Industry Collaboration

University-industry (U-I) collaboration has gained increased attention in recent years. Several best practices and models have been proposed to address the problem of establishing U-I collaborations and improving their effectiveness. It is important for the stakeholders to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of their collaborative efforts in order to identify and adopt improvements. One way to assess effectiveness is through the maturity models approach that has been applied successfully in other areas such as quality assurance, knowledge management, and business processes. Our literature review indicates a lack of existing collaboration maturity models. In this paper, we present the University-industry Collaboration Maturity Model (UICMM) - a collaboration maturity model based on the thorough review of best practices for collaboration described in existing literature, and existing maturity models relevant to collaborations. UICMM is intended to be a useful benchmarking tool for a range of stakeholders including universities and industry to assess and benchmark their collaborative efforts. The underlying hypothesis while developing this maturity model is that a higher level of maturity will lead to increased collaboration and improved outcomes.