Industry-academic research partnerships are mostly considered interesting to increase industrial innovativeness, and its benefits have been discussed in the flourishing open innovation literature. However, how to create mutually beneficial partnerships seems to be a question that has not been sufficiently studied. Through this article, we discuss the goals of these partnerships by modelling different types of collaboration. We defend that their real value has to be evaluated not only by looking at the knowledge created, but also at the increase of generativity we observe, due to interactions between academia and industry. Furthermore, we propose a model based on C-K theory that can be used to design a research collaboration that increases generativity, going beyond problem solving and knowledge transfer logics. We illustrate it through a case study, which shows that value creation in an industry-research partnership is increased by a model of co-generation, instead of considering these relations as a one-way transfer. Furthermore, we show that conflicts in a partnership can be solved through a C-K based tool.