What does it take to turn collaboration into a strategy for innovation? What do we need to know about collaboration in order to make use of it? These are some of the questions that I ask in my research, which aims at understanding the implications of the way collaboration has been politicized in recent years.

These questions have recently become matters of concern for many governments, companies and universities. They are in line a prevalent tendency to support a particular type of research ‘in the context of application’ (named Mode 2) and to promote collaboration as an important tool for solving problems of great societal importance. In this PhD project, I study how collaboration has become a matter of concern in a specific ‘mode 2’ site, the Danish pharmaceutical company H. Lundbeck. Managers in Lundbeck have recently set themselves the task of developing a strategy that will serve as a long-term solution to a current financial predicament. Their strategy moves them into new relationships with external partners in new basic research areas where they are not experts. I examine how they connect with new entities and partners and how they build innovation platforms in these sites. I am particularly interested in studying what they talk about when collaboration is politicized and what they talk about when it is not politicized. My research is based on concepts and ideas from the interdisciplinary field Science and Technology Studies (STS).