Abstract

Industry stakeholders invest heavily in academic collaborations, making it essential to define success measures. Evaluating UIC helps focus efforts and allocate resources effectively, yet assessing knowledge value and partnership status is challenging due to their dynamic nature. These complexities hinder the establishment of rigid success criteria. To address this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with executives from global conglomerates across 13 industries. This diverse sample allowed us to examine direct and indirect metrics used by multinational companies to assess academic partnerships. We analyzed best practices and assessment frequencies, developing a comprehensive scheme of proxy indicators. This framework incorporates qualitative and quantitative measures, capturing both success factors and failure indicators. Our findings fill a gap in industry perspectives on UIC, offering an extensive, inductively derived scheme of proxy indicators. These reflect industry considerations regarding success, failure, and partnership evaluations. By expanding theoretical evidence and refining proxy measures, our research provides new insights into academic collaboration assessment.