Collaborative Strategies for Innovation Capacity-Building: A Study of MIT's International Partnerships

Over the past two decades, the key role of universities for innovation and economic development has become a central concern of policy-makers and researchers alike. This paper discusses international university collaborations as a deliberate strategy in national and regional innovation policy to build innovation capacity through universities in transitioning economies. Using four of MIT's major international partnerships as case studies - the Cambridge-MIT Institute, the MIT-Portugal Program, and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, and a suite of relationships between MIT and Singapore - this paper aims to provide a first analysis of this increasingly popular policy instrument. We will first develop a policy rationale for why countries seek to engage in such a collaborative, university-centred strategy. Using a systems architecture approach, we will then analyse the different collaborative models employed in the four case studies and discuss how they address specific country needs and contexts. Our findings reject simplistic, quasi-mechanistic notions of emulation and best-practice transfer, and instead underscore the specific national character of each collaboration and the flexibility of the collaborations as a policy instrument. To illuminate how these questions of systemic embedding translate into program design, governance, and evolution, we further present a collaboration lifecycle model that can help inform policy decisions and program management for these collaborations in the future. We believe that MIT's collaborations are no isolated occurrences, but spearheading a paradigm shift in international innovation policy whereby purposeful linkages to eminent entrepreneurial universities may become key instruments in innovation capacity building, thus redefining the role of leading universities in global economic development.