Digital platforms for academia–industry knowledge exchange: characterisation, functions, and types

Digital platforms have transformed how goods and services are exchanged, but their role in knowledge exchange, particularly between academia and industry, remains underexplored. Like dating apps that help match unique and diverse individuals virtually, digital platforms facilitate interactions between academia and industry. However, exactly how they do that remains open. Drawing on the digital platform and the knowledge transfer intermediation literature, we conduct multiple case studies analysing the functionality of nine digital platforms that support interactions between academia and industry. Each of the studied platforms performs five key functions: reducing proximity limitations and transaction costs, engaging with users’ knowledge, supporting knowledge codification, transforming knowledge, and facilitating matchmaking. Notably, two functions, knowledge engagement and transformation, vary along continuums from surface-level to deep interaction and from generalisation to personalisation. Following these continuums, we distinguish four platform types: display-window, relationship-enabler, broker, and deep-dive. By revealing how digital platforms facilitate knowledge exchange between academia and industry, we substantiate the literature on innovation intermediaries and illustrate how digital platforms overcome limitations of classical intermediaries. We reframe academia–industry interaction as a platform-enabled process and show how digital platforms allow for knowledge-based digital matchmaking prior to any interaction between individuals, in contrast to traditional collaboration scenarios.