Review on the dimensions of business-university alliances

The present paper is concerned with identifying and synthesizing the directions of development of the partnerships between the academic environment and the business environment found in main research dedicated articles in the last five years in three relevant databases: Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, Science Direct and PROQUEST Central. The method we employed consists in tertiary data selection, processing and filtering by means of adequate software. The thorough literature review on partnerships between the academic and business environments revealed eight main directions of development: sponsoring activities, collaborative research (research partnerships and research services), curriculum development and delivery, academic entrepreneurship, human resource transfer (mobility of academics, mobility of students), informal interaction, commercialization of property right, and scientific publications. In order to qualify the directions of the partnerships we analysed their definitions, identified their goals and the economic and social impacts that they had.