Performance management of public-private collaboration in innovation

The open innovation literature has highlighted that more focus should be placed on non-pecuniary sources such as public research institutes (PRIs) and their performance management (PM), while innovation network studies have highlighted the growing importance of universities and PRIs in public-private research partnerships. Building on PM capability and portfolio management perspectives, this research aims is to examine the relationship between knowledge resources and collaboration outcome in such public-private collaborations, and the mediating role of senior management team's (SMT) ability to govern project portfolio approval and management processes. Examining 153 innovation commercialization collaboration projects between PRIs and firms in Singapore, our study has made several significant contributions to the existing research on innovation and performance in public-private partnership. First, we empirically demonstrate that there is a direct positive relationship between PRIs' knowledge resources and collaboration outcome. Second, our findings establish that the PRIs' SMT ability to govern project portfolio processes mediates this positive relationship. Third, this research highlights that the SMT ability to govern project portfolio processes fully mediates the conversion of market knowledge into innovation. Only partial mediation is observed in the case of technological knowledge, which directly creates value by virtue of generating discoveries or breakthroughs.