Leveraging communities of practice in university-industry collaboration: a case study on Arctic research

This paper proposes the concept of communities of practice (CoPs) to intensify university-industry collaboration. In this case study, the concept of CoP is applied in the development of the Northern Research and Innovation Platform (NRIP). The NRIP is an open forum in northern Finland for university-industry collaboration promoting knowledge and expertise in environment, energy and natural resources with a strong geographical emphasis on the Arctic aspect. The NRIP provides a platform for people to search for opportunities to cooperate in generating knowledge to help solving the multidisciplinary problems of the Barents region. This study contributes to the research on CoPs and adds the understanding of shared knowledge as a basis of university-industry collaboration. It provides new empirical evidence on the power of working in the communities for more efficient and innovative approaches. We recommend that academia and industry select the open innovation strategy in their CoPs to achieve next-level collaboration.