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In the applied sciences and in engineering there is often a significant overlap between work at universities and in industry. For the individual scholar, this may lead to serious conflicts when working on joint university-industry projects. Differences in goals, such as the university's aim to disseminate knowledge while industry aims to appropriate knowledge, might lead to complicated situations and conflicts of interest. The detailed cases of two electrical engineers and two architects working at two different universities of technology illustrate the kinds of problems individual scholars face in university-business collaborations. These cases are based on qualitative interviews and additional data and demonstrate that, while value conflicts emerge on the organizational level, it is primarily the individual researcher who must deal with such conflicts. This analysis adds to existing studies in two ways: first, it explicitly addresses normative issues framed in terms of ethical and social values, thereby going beyond the common social-science perspective of university-business collaboration. Secondly, it provides qualitative insights, thereby identifying details and issues not apparent in quantitative studies. In particular, it is evident that university-industry collaborations are prone to value conflicts not only in research but also in education and job training.

Previous studies investigating proximity and collaboration have not clarified personal elements, such as working or communication style. Here, we show that personal proximity-close similarity in terms of personal traits and behavioral patterns-substantially affects the whole life cycle of research collaborations. We conduct a multi-case study of Dutch nanotechnology researchers. We select our interviewees through a bibliometric analysis and focus on the most central Dutch nanotechnology researchers in the global network. Our results reveal that social proximity and temporary geographical proximity have indirect effects enabling potential partners to assess their personal proximity. Sufficient levels of personal proximity often make or break the deal, provided that partners' cognitive and organizational proximity-which are major drivers of research collaborations-suffice. Introducing personal proximity to analyze research collaborations puts previous findings on proximity dimensions' effect on collaboration in a new perspective.