Brokering Open Science: Unveiling Institutional Change Agency in University–Industry Research Collaboration

Abstract

This study examines how individuals or groups influence institutional conditions in university–industry research collaboration (UIRC) to promote open science (OS) practices. Two systematically selected UIRC cases, funded by companies and public research funders (i.e., Horizon 2020 and Business Finland), demonstrate successful influence on institutional conditions at the supranational level of the European Union. At this level, institutional entrepreneurship resulted in an effective OS policy for one UIRC case, yielding strong OS outcomes. By contrast, weaker national OS policies enabled individual change agencies to thrive in the other UIRC case. This study identifies a new mode of institutional change agency—institutional brokerage—in which actors translate and justify a pre-existing vision for institutional change to suit local contexts. It highlights the role of public funding bodies and their policies in promoting OS practices in UIRC. In addition, this study proposes an analytical framework that combines institutional logics, institutional entrepreneurship, and institutional navigation to study institutional change in multi-level institutional systems.