Collaboration Between University, Industry, and Society for Sustainability Innovation

The emerging field of sustainability science is facing a serious challenge of establishing it as an academic field through institutionalization and networking and collaboration with stakeholders in society. As sustainability science is aimed at understanding the fundamental characteristics of complex and dynamic interactions between natural, human, and social systems, a broad range of academic disciplines are required, including natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities. Thus many concepts and methodologies have been proposed in sustainability science, which poses a significant challenge to establishing it an academic field. Sustainability science can be considered as an academic field that analyzes the processes of production, diffusion, and utilization of various types of knowledge with long-term consequences for society. Three components can be identified in a knowledge circulation system in society: knowledge, actors, and institutions. Knowledge itself has aspects of content, quantity, quality, and rate of circulation. Important aspects of actors are their heterogeneity, linkages and networks, and interactions among them. Institutions cover a diverse set of entities, ranging from informal ones such as norms, routines, and established practices to more formal ones including rules, laws, and standards. Sustainability science thus deals with dynamic, complex interactions among diverse actors creating, transmitting, and applying various types of knowledge under specific institutional conditions. There are many phases that can be identified in the production, diffusion, and utilization of knowledge by different actors, without necessarily involving coordination with one another. Gaps and inconsistencies inevitably exist among different phases in terms of the quantity, quality, and rate of knowledge processed. This effectively constitutes a major challenge in pursuing sustainability on a global scale. As sustainable development requires diverse types of knowledge, collaboration across disciplinary, organizational, and geographical boundaries has increasingly become more commonplace. We discuss how collaboration networks involving academia, industry and the public sector have influenced the co-evolution of scientific and technological progress and institutions in society, examining the structure, functions, and evolution of networks. University could play a critical role in establishing collaboration networks among various stakeholders in society for promoting technological and institutional changes for sustainability innovation.