**1. Introduction**

Joint industry-academia research projects are promoted by governments and funding agencies, and more and more companies and research centers are engaged in this type of project. The objective is to undertake research projects mixing participants from one company (or a consortium of companies) and from a single (or multiple) academic research center(s). These research projects are supposed to benefit to every participant: boosting research and development (R&D) and innovation in companies and stimulating impactful academic research. Such projects also aim at facilitating knowledge sharing between academics and practitioners as well as knowledge creation/generation thanks to industry-academia interactions. An educational ambition is sometimes explicitly included in such projects with the objective of enhancing the competences of the parties involved in the research project through dialogue, co-working, and mutual learning.

Knowledge creation is often an expected but challenging output of such projects [1]. Mots partners involved in this kind of projects expect to learn from the others. The project management often lead partners to share knowledge and the interactions during the projects sometimes end with knowledge generation. Anticipated or not, explicitly managed or not, there are knowledge management (KM) processes in joint industry-academia research projects. Even if there is no deliberate KM in the management of these projects, KM is a key issue in joint industry-academia research projects since they pose the question of who the existing and new knowledge belongs to and how can the partners use it and create value from it. More generally, these projects could (or should) have an explicit place in the KM strategies of the partners. The literature studying joint industry-academia research projects assumes these projects should end with knowledge creation, that can even be a co-creation (e.g. [1, 2]) or co-production (e.g. [3, 4]). However, the dynamic of this knowledge creation remains a black box. In line with the need for further research at a microlevel [2], the first objective of this research is to open the knowledge creation black box and study the knowledge processes at work.

There are many ways of conducting joint industry-academia research projects. Some projects, broken into work packages done separately, do not end with close industry-academia collaboration. Our experience of joint industry-academia research projects in management sciences, more precisely in the domain of logistics and supply chain management (SCM), shows that industry-academia interactions are fundamental to create knowledge valuable from a managerial and an academic perspective [5]. The key role of industry-academia interactions [2, 3] and dialogue [1] is now clearly recognized and appears critical to enhance the impact of industry-academia collaboration [4]. Therefore, it seems important to adopt research approaches that demand or at least favor these interactions that, according to [1] and [2], support knowledge co-creation. However, despite the importance of research approaches [5, 6], literature studying joint industry-academia research projects does not discuss much the role of research approaches in knowledge creation.

Indeed, many scholars consider that mutually productive form of collaboration between research and practice are the more likely to be both relevant to contemporary practice and the source of new meaningful knowledge as well as increased research impacts [4]. Action research refers to a class of research approaches focused on knowledge creation aiming at performing collaboratively embedded action and research. However, to our knowledge, little is known about the dynamic of the KM processes at work in such projects. If recent papers studying universityindustry collaborations at a micro-level adopt action research (such as [1, 2, 4]), to our knowledge, none provide any in-depth analysis of the contribution of action research to the knowledge creation dynamic. This is the second objective of this research targeting at academic and professional outputs, in line with a recent call in KM literature [6].

### *The Dynamic of Knowledge Creation in Joint Industry-Academia Research Projects… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101985*

To address the above mentioned gaps, we adopted an action research approach to deepen our understanding of the knowledge processes in joint industry-academia research projects with an explicit knowledge creation ambition. Under the umbrella of this methodological choice that leads industry and academia to interact with each other, we launched successively two research projects with a global manufacturing company. Each project addresses research questions related to core contemporary logistics and SCM issues of strategic importance for the company. Therefore, the two projects have a double objective: 1) to do the collaborative research works decided with the partner; 2) to analyze industry-academia interactions during the projects, especially the knowledge processes at work and their dynamic in terms of knowledge creation.

The research contributions are at the conceptual, methodological, and practical level. The research provides a conceptual basis to study the knowledge processes at work in joint industry-academia research projects. It also discusses action research as a valuable class of research approaches in joint industry-academia research projects. The research opens the knowledge creation black box and provides an in-depth insight of the knowledge processes and their interactions. The research proposes a framework of knowledge creation dynamic that can inspire joint industry-academia research partners in the management of their collaborative projects and KM strategies.

The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the context of joint industry-academia research projects and why it is of interest to deepen the study of KM processes in this context. A review of the KM literature focused on knowledge processes clarifies the objectives of the chapter in terms of KM: deepen the study of knowledge processes dynamics, especially knowledge creation/generation and knowledge sharing/transfer. Section 3 builds upon our experience of joint industryacademia research projects to justify the choice of an action research approach to deepen the study of KM processes in such projects. An analysis of action research approaches highlights differences and commonality. Section 4 presents and analyzes two action research projects and the knowledge processes at work in these projects. A framework of industry-academia knowledge creation dynamic and factors influencing it derive from the reflective/reflexive analysis. Conclusion underlines the value of action research in joint industry-academia research projects to boost knowledge creation. It also questions the adoption of a deliberate KM in the management of these projects that could be a brick of the partners' KM strategies.
