Enhancing innovation in aviation: Applying the Triple Helix Model and PMBOK in the UAE-Sweden partnership

To sustain economic growth and generate new ideas for innovation, academia, industries, and governments should cooperate to develop successful research and development ecosystems. Indeed, the collaboration between these parties is required to extend beyond the basic funding provided by industries to research projects conducted by universities. Hence, collaboration must occur in an integrated environment so that each party plays its role including problem identification, setting the regulations, funding, conducting the research, etc. On the other hand, due to globalization, collaboration in research and development has become international where teams from different countries or continents collaborate in various ways. Indeed, the integrated collaboration between industry, governments, and academia improves the impact of the research outcome on society by addressing problems of interest to society while involving all the concerned parties. One of the known frameworks in this context, the Triple Helix Model (THM), has been used in this study to foster international collaboration in aviation. The international collaboration involved two universities representing academia, civil aviation authorities, public funding bodies, and air navigation services representing the government bodies, in addition to aviation industries from Sweden and the United Arab Emirates. The focus of the collaboration was the development of knowledge-based open innovation in the form of a traffic management tool that optimizes, simulates, and visualizes delivery scenarios of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).