Abstract
With a commitment to foster innovation and economic growth, universities in Sub-Saharan Africa have been encouraged to embrace the various policies and practices promoting university-industry collaboration (UIC) in Europe and North America, including the creation of industry liaison offices. However, to-date, little is known about the most appropriate and effective ways of contextualizing these prescriptive frameworks to the realities of Sub-Saharan Africa, where UIC continues to be perceived as weak, limited, and lacking in formality. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 women academics and research scientists, we present an organizational justice perspective of UIC in six Sub-Saharan African countries: Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, Botswana, Nigeria and Zambia. Our findings reveal the existence of information asymmetry, organizational inefficiency, and organizational mistrust within universities in Sub-Saharan Africa. We contribute to the literature by developing a conceptual framework that highlights how managerial practices shape three distinct dimensions of UIC in Sub-Saharan Africa: motives, channels, and outcomes. Our article shows that addressing problems of equity and fairness within the organizational and relational context can help to improve UIC in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially the subtle culture of exclusion within universities weakening the visionary attempts to foster innovation and economic growth through UIC.