K4P Alliances consider the need to promote institutional innovations and the development of new collaborative institutional frameworks and arrangements fostering new practices and new policies driven by new knowledge in increasingly complex network systems in the Global South.

Our approach is based on the fact that collaborative arrangements may act as agents of change to foster the human ability to rise innovation. They consider institutional innovations oriented to innovation-based growth through the diversification and densification of the research landscape in a global system of increasing fragmented production.

It aims to consider distributed, plural and collaborative institutional frameworks with local communities and experts worldwide.

The ultimate goal is to stimulate the development of effective centers of excellence, sustainable in the long term and, thereby, adopting the form of “Collaborative Laboratories”. These must encompass interface and intermediation activities with the public and private sectors, as well as civil society organizations.

The following overall principles are considered under K4P Alliances:

1. Collaborative Laboratories aim to foster the effective densification of the territories in terms of knowledge-based activities, through a growing institutionalization of forms of collaboration between science, technology and higher education institutions and the economic and social fabric, namely companies, the hospital and health system, cultural institutions and social organizations. It is associated to the need to promote the development of public and semi-public goods, through collaborative spaces between public and private institutions.
   Collaborative Laboratories must, therefore, consolidate and promote the capacity and potential that the scientific, academic and business communities have to face the opportunity to relate knowledge with well-being and social and economic development. It is an opportunity for scientific and academic institutions, in close collaboration with economic, social and cultural actors, to contribute to the sustainable development of locally and globally relevant initiatives, with an effective impact on society, stimulating the local creation of qualified employment.


2. Second, they aim to diversifying the research and innovation landscape, complementing the existing structure and the performance of traditional research Laboratories. The ultimate goal is to stimulate the active participation of scientific and academic systems in better understand complex and large-scale problems, generally not susceptible of being solved within a single disciplinary, scientific, technological or institutional strand. They imply the coordination of different scales and a business, social and cultural intervention with a view to implementing effective solutions with a socio-economic impact. Thus, Collaborative Laboratories have a complementary and supplementary role to that of research centers, as well as technological centers or the most traditional public State Laboratories and, naturally, companies.


3. Third, the role to be played by the Collaborative Laboratories is especially important to stimulate “flows of global-local knowledge”, between demand and supply, supply and demand, in association with new forms of interaction and a non-linear relationship between research, innovation and social and economic development activities. In this respect, the analysis considers processes stimulating the co-design and co-accountability of participating institutions for knowledge transfer and diffusion processes and improving the value of products and services provided by companies, as well as facilitating the social relevance of research activity and its appropriation by society.


4. Last, but not least, the development and promotion of Collaborative Laboratories has been stimulated in many regions worldwide to foster the mobilization of research and innovation agendas and programs of international relevance and local impact. Their ultimate goal is to encourage qualified employment and the creation of economic and social value in terms of innovation-based growth.