In the dynamic landscape of university-industry collaborations (UIC), effective knowledge management is essential for innovation and the success of joint projects. Knowledge is one of the most valuable resources in the modern economy in the digital age of big data. Whereas digital collaboration platforms and artificial intelligence open up new possibilities for accessing and managing substantial knowledge, the potential of students’ (research) projects often remains unexplored. After their completion, usually at the end of the semester, these projects typically lose relevance and receive no further attention, even though they can provide valuable insights and innovations for the industry. At the same time, innovation ideas in companies are often not realized due to a lack of employees and time. Against this background, the AI-supported platform IdeaLize was developed to increase the interdisciplinary promotion of innovation as well as the exchange of knowledge and ideas between different institutions. The platform enables (research) projects and ideas to be published as well as suitable partners and their skills to be connected using an LLM-based matching algorithm. Integrated conversational AI also simplifies platform use. Despite these advantages, innovative knowledge management platforms remain underutilized in UICs. It is therefore necessary to understand for what purposes and with what motivation companies would use such platforms and what specific requirements they have. At the same time, it should be examined whether the university environment considers these requirements to be useful and worthy of support by subsequently validating the companies’ statements with university employees. In this study, we are therefore conducting a requirements analysis to identify the specific needs and expectations of companies with regard to IdeaLize. The content of this requirements analysis will then be evaluated afterwards with university employees. The aim is to work out functional and interactive requirements as well as critical success factors from the company’s perspective in order to derive recommendations for optimizing the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design of platforms like IdeaLize. Methodologically, we follow the design science research approach according to Peffers et al. (2007). We perform a structured literature analysis on the state of the art of current knowledge exchange technologies according to Fettke (2006). Furthermore, we collect qualitative data for the requirements analysis through semi-structured expert interviews according to Bogner et al. (2014), which are analyzed using qualitative content analysis according to Mayring (2010). Our work contributes to closing the gap in knowledge management due to the insufficient use of digital platforms by providing targeted UX/UI optimizations for innovative project platforms, such as IdeaLize, and thus promoting the sustainable use of digital platforms in the knowledge management of UICs.

Keywords: Collaboration platforms, innovation promotion, knowledge management, requirement analysis, UIC.