Hur kan akademi organisera samverkan för tillväxt? Deliberativ Organiserad Samverkan, DOS, en ny styrningsmodell

Sammanfattning: Within research and education policies of later decades, a clear trend can be seen in expanded attempts to stimulate growth-concentrated cooperation between government, academia and industry. With economic financing, channelled to academia through different kinds of research and development councils, follows a responsibility to operationally organize the actors' cooperation. This task is rather complex. The cooperative process is expected to be equal, provided that the participating actors have different professional identities, belong to different organizations, have different values and ideas of norms, and satisfy different interests. With present research and education policies, follows the idea of academia acting as a potential growth engine that should be directly used to develop society's innovation system, production system and markets. In connection with this, discussions regarding academic capitalism, commercialisation of research results, incubation processes, etc., are being conducted. The traditional role of academia as a research university has also been complemented by the roles of organizer for growth-concentrated cooperation and entrepreneur.Pursuing independent research, being an organizer for similar cooperation, and satisfying their personal interests all at the same time is contradictory. A way for academia to prevent their own interests from getting out of hand during cooperation is to avoid all forms of external management, and instead focus on stimulating the participating actors to evaluate, develop and manage their cooperation themselves. Conventional education, research and project models are developed for purposes other than this. Desipte this, their usage with the cooperative task is rather widespred. For cooperative actors to understand and handle their activities in an aware, collective and flexible manner, they need to use some form of management model that allows for communicative coordination, evaluation and development of organizational action. As an alternative to those conventional models, a new management model has been developed in this thesis, called Deliberative Organized Cooperation, DOC. The model is developed with inspiration from deliberative theory. Simply put, the actors' cooperation is expected to occur through repeated dialectic movements between deliberative phases (management process), where actors produce valid action alternatives and legitimate interpersonal and systematic relations, and systematic phases (operational activities), where the actors transform the gained validity and legitimacy in systematic action and resulting factuality. While the deliberative phase corresponds to evaluation and development orientated logic with open rationality conditions, the systematic phase corresponds to production orientated logic with closed rationality conditions.The primary empirical results of the thesis are collected from activities that have been driven or are driven within or closely connected to two competence centres located at Luleå Univeristy of Technology. The first competence centre, the Polhem Laboratory, is presently being phased out and replaced by the Faste Laboratory. Both operations can be described with help from the Triple Helix model. Simply stated, the government contributes with direct economic funding for R&D as well as the overall rules of the game regarding the actors' cooperation, the industry with supplementary economic funding and direct turnover of the developed knowledge. The economic funding also goes to academia with an organizing of the cooperation process, knowledge development and commercialisation of interesting spin-off knowledge. An essential element in the operations of the Polhem and Faste Laboratories constitutes the so-called Sirius Project, an industrially oriented product development project conducted by fourth year students in the mechanical engineering program. This project is primarily conducted in cooperation between academia and large companies. Closely connected to this activity, Arena innovative technology and business, organizes multi-science undergraduate studies. An important part of this education is to cooperate in so-called greenhouse projects. Here, students from various study years and majors, meets researchers/teachers from different subject fields, and actors from different companies and development firms. The over-all aim of the projects is to stimulate entrepreneurship and starting of new robust companies. DOC comprises an attempt to solve management problem identified in connection to the above activities.The activities have been investigated through participating observations. Individual events have been worked upon and weaved together into a cohesive and anonymous scenario that is told by giving voices to a variety of the participating actors. In the theoretically oriented chapter of the thesis, events are problematised from the scenario through analytical and pragmatic reflections. With help of these reflections, the DOC model is successively built up.