Open Access

Bikash Budhathoki

• University-Industry Collaboration (UIC) is considered by academics and industry as a vital factor that has the power to both positively and negatively impact the open innovation (OI). To contribute to the literature and to identify challenges as well as to conceptualize some recommendations to help industries, this thesis raised a question: what are the challenges of UIC and what recommendations can be made to solve the challenges. The main research objective was to recognize the determinants of UIC challenges. An empirical study was conducted in order to give an answer to the research questions and to meet the research objective. This research explicitly focused on students/interns and internships to analyze and to discover the challenges and solutions since students or internships are the least researched area in the field of UIC research. Participants were personally contacted with the survey link that was created online to conduct explorative research with the help of close-ended (quantitative) and open-ended (qualitative) questions. The results reveal that there are numerous challenges students face during the internship and thus these most likely hinder the successful UIC and ultimately successful OI. According to the results obtained from both quantitative and qualitative sections obvious and major challenges lie in innovation mediators ‘organizational culture’. From the quantitative result perspective only, major challenges are in the area of absorptive capacity and supervisors' support, internalization, and trust. Similarly, from the qualitative results perspective only, major challenges are bad crisis management, communication, and hierarchical structure.