Misaligned Co-Production: A Framework for Exploring Academic-Industry Relations

As many authors have noted, contemporary research can be characterized by a number of hybrid relations between researchers based in a variety of different organizations, both within and outside the university. Whilst historians might argue that there is very little new in the existence of academic-industrial inter-connections within scientific research, there is still a tendency – in research publications but also in the statements of policy-makers – to present ‘academic’ and ‘industrial’ research as if they occupied fundamentally different realms. In this paper, we propose and discuss a framework of ‘misaligned co-production’ defined as a process of ‘understanding differences’, i.e. appreciating and holding them open without anticipating strong alignment. While ‘aligned co-production’ is the basis for most accounts of successful collaboration in the STS literature we propose that focusing on moments of ‘misaligned co-production’ gives new insight into how academic and industrial researchers collaborate without smoothing out differences. We explore the advantages of this framework based on case examples of academic-industry collaborations from a field study in a Danish pharmaceutical company.