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The importance of public and private third-party funding of universities has changed over the last decades. However, the knowledge about how universities finance their research are rather limited. We aim to fill this gap and investigate the funding structure of universities and how third-party funding has changed over time. In our explorative analysis, we use publicly available data of four Austrian universities. We analyze this data at university level as well as the level of the faculty of business and economics. We provide insight into the development and structure of third-party funding and conclude that universities' funding structures differ and has developed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of late, the problems of private external, or third-party funding of universities have been the subject of much debate, even at universities of economics and business. Given the constraints on government funding, politicians are looking increasingly to this source, with university leaders (rectors, deans, department heads) frequently being set targets for increasing income from it. Yet it is important to distinguish between different types of external funds. Moreover, their advantages and potential drawbacks must be weighed up. This paper seeks to do that, against the background of the author's more than 13 years as Rector of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). Much of the paper thus draws rather less on theory than on that practical experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research partnerships between university researchers and industry partners are becoming increasingly prevalent. For university researchers, maintaining autonomy is crucial. We explore how researchers strategically manage autonomy in collaborative research partnerships, using a framework to distinguish strategically planned and opportunity-driven behaviour in the process of selecting partners and executing research in partnerships. We then focus on the management of autonomy in setting research directions and managing the research process. We draw on insights from 14 management scholars engaged in collaborative Ph.D. research projects. Based on our analysis, we show that researcher autonomy has two facets: operational and scientific. Researchers are willing to compromise their operational autonomy as a price for industry collaboration. They have a strong need for scientific autonomy when deciding on research direction and research execution. Although they need funding, entering a specific relationship with industry and accepting restrictions on their operational autonomy is a choice. We conclude that researchers' orientations towards practice and theory affects their choices in partnerships as well as modes of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European universities are experiencing increasing financial pressures. Given that governmental budgets are cut, they have to additionally rely on further sources of funding. Multi-party funding, however, is not easily managed and poses serious challenges on academic research. This study explores the question "What tensions result from multiple-party funding, what are possible consequences of the different funding strategies and—transferring the findings to the university context—how can universities establish and manage multiple-party funded research?" We conducted a qualitative single case study in a non-university research center (NRC). NRC has gone through the process of increasing financial pressure and now relies on multiple sources of financing that have to be managed concurrently. Our results discuss opportunities and threats and reveal core tensions related to multiple-party funding activities. Adopting a paradox lens allows us to transfer the insights from this case to the university context. We systematically discuss consequences for universities and academic research and suggest approaches of actively managing tensions via strategies of accepting, differentiating and integrating. We thereby contribute to the discussion how to establish and manage third-party funded research for European universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on contemporary and historical discourse around UK business schools and insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, we argue that business schools should be understood and judged, not as they typically have been, as engines of knowledge production, but as engines of credibility production. Credibility, we argue, is central to the attractiveness of business schools to students and other key stakeholders and therefore credibility, and the mechanisms through which credibility are maintained, should be at the center of strategic thinking within business schools. We argue that over-reliance on funding from corporate sources can have profound consequences for the ability of schools to continue to produce credibility. This article focuses primarily on the experiences of business schools in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on third party funding for academic institutions has demonstrated that it entails positive and negative outcomes. This manuscript deals with this idea from a reputational perspective, using the options theory as the framework for the analysis. The reasoning is based on the definition of a reputational income that is supposed to follow a stochastic behavior. It is modelled as a mean reverting type process, which is modified to introduce a correction factor with the aim of capturing the special reputational sensitivity of academic institutions regarding funding issues. We develop a stochastic partial differential equation, and we use its solution to deploy a sensitivity analysis to identify how the value of reputation reacts to changes in certain key variables. We find that the value of reputation increases if the academic institution becomes more sensitive to reputation related issues, or if there is an increase in the reputational reward that the market offers to a continued commitment to third-party funding. Also, the value of reputation gets higher as the ability to recover from reputational pitfalls strengths, but it decreases in a framework with high uncertainty and risk. So, this research proposes a mathematical formalization for the reputational dimension of third party funding in academic institutions, with the aim of identifying the critical variables that are likely to affect their reputational value and, thus, assist managers in their decision-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]