Universities as internationalisation catalysts: reversing roles in university-industry collaboration

University-Industry (U-I) collaboration is vital to the development of society. However, this important interaction has become somewhat of a caricature whereby a sequential and unidirectional relationship exists with universities creating knowledge and industries commercialising it. We address this issue by using the Triple Helix (TH) perspective and the network-revised Uppsala model of internationalisation to demonstrate how this relationship can be reversed. We present an embedded longitudinal case study of a UK-China Innovation Programme, run by a UK university with the aim of supporting the development of 62 collaborative innovation projects between 58 UK small and medium enterprises and Chinese organisations. The results reveal a pressing need to revisit universities’ third mission: transfer of academic knowledge to industry. The findings demonstrate universities’ role as internationalisation catalysts for firms engaged in U-I collaboration. This signals an important and underexplored component of the TH perspective. The knowledge exchange type in U-I relationships shows a possible reversal in firm and university roles, where knowledge and technology are contributed by firms, and access to markets is orchestrated by universities, which become internationalisation platforms.