ThinkBox: After an innovation project ends, what about its impact? The university, collaboration and innovation governance

ThinkBox: After an innovation project ends, what about its impact? The university, collaboration and innovation governanceThe day after an innovation project ends Imagine an ordinary day at the university, one that marks the end of an innovation project.Faculty members conducted research, students learned and a company whose problem was the focus of the project tracked and participated in the work.The prototype passed the planned tests, and the resulting report was approved by the oversight committees, funding bodies and the company itself.Everyone played their part, and the experience yielded publishable knowledge.The following morning, however, the company has a tested technological solution before it, one that has yet to be integrated into its operations.Processes need to be adapted, suppliers coordinated and staff prepared.The university has stopped providing support, and using the solution has come to depend on decisions that nobody is currently equipped or designated to make.In short, despite the technological output, its realization as an innovation remains an open question.In that hypothetical scene, no party has failed to fulfill its obligations to the project.Indeed, the term "innovation project" identifies an aim to innovate; it does not establish that an innovation has already been achieved.It is the interval between what is delivered and what is realized that, in this article, we call "the day after."We stress, moreover, that the expression does not mean that the project's effects begin only after its completion.The scene thus prompts a question it does not answer: What is the innovation project's impact?When an innovation project's report is approved, we have a record of its conclusion but not the birth certificate of an innovation.Completing a project well and realizing an innovation's expected benefits are kindred but distinct events, because the quality of delivery alone does not guarantee those benefits.Furthermore, examining a project's impact calls for attention to both favorable and unfavorable consequences, intended or otherwise as well as to evidence of their relationship with the initiative (Reed, Ferr� e, Martin-Ortega, Blanche, Lawford-Rolfe, Dallimer, & Holden, 2021).The scene also does not reveal how often innovation projects end while decisions needed to use their results remain unresolved.The literature does, however, offer ways of examining that situation.Fini, Rasmussen, Siegel, and Wiklund (2018) proposed studying science commercialization as a means of bringing about broader societal consequences.Whyte and Nussbaum (2020) showed that the transition from project to operations involves articulation work between changing forms of organization.Perkmann, Salandra, Tartari, McKelvey, and Hughes (2021) found that evidence on the educational, commercial and societal impacts of academic engagement, understood as researchers' knowledge-related interactions with external organizations, remained inconclusive.Together, those contributions encourage discussion about what comes after an innovation project's delivery.In this essay, we draw on the Brazilian context to prompt reflection on the decisions and responsibilities that accompany the use of knowledge in university initiatives.What is at stake is not the reputation of a successfully completed project but what university knowledge can become beyond the walls of the university.That question takes on a distinctive shape in Brazil when such projects are linked to university extension, understood here as interaction with other sectors of society integrated with teaching and research or draw on endowment funds.CNE/CES Resolution No. 7/2018 requires university extension to account