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Assessing public–private research collaboration: is it possible to compare university performance?

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Abstract

It is widely recognized that collaboration between the public and private research sectors should be stimulated and supported, as a means of favoring innovation and regional development. This work takes a bibliometric approach, based on co-authorship of scientific publications, to propose a model for comparative measurement of the performance of public research institutions in collaboration with the domestic industry collaboration with the private sector. The model relies on an identification and disambiguation algorithm developed by the authors to link each publication to its real authors. An example of application of the model is given, for the case of the academic system and private enterprises in Italy. The study demonstrates that for each scientific discipline and each national administrative region, it is possible to measure the performance of individual universities in both intra-regional and extra-regional collaboration, normalized with respect to advantages of location. Such results may be useful in informing regional policies and merit-based public funding of research organizations.

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Notes

  1. This result is seen in studies from various nations including examples from Australia (Harman 1999), Norway (Gulbrandsen and Smeby 2005) and Italy (Abramo et al. 2009).

  2. Legislation in 2001 introduced the so called “academic privilege”, presumably resulting in additional patents filed by university researchers, but relevant data are not readily available, making the identification of joint patents very difficult.

  3. The U.S. Bay-Dohle Act provides an example of a measure to protect domestic industry by regulating university licensing: the model is emulated by a number of other countries.

  4. A list of all SDS may be found at http://www.miur.it/atti/2000/alladm001004_01.htm.

  5. The discipline of civil engineering produces few publications listed in the SCITM. For this reason it is not included in the field of analysis.

  6. In the analysis of Hicks and Hamilton (1999), concerning publications by US authors between 1981 and 1994, as indexed in the Science Citation Index, university–industry co-authored publications result as 5.5% of total university publications.

  7. The authors note that the work by Tijssen did not inspire the current work, since it came to their awareness only at the moment that the current work was submitted for publication.

  8. It should be noted that in addition to universities (research institutes) also contribute to the production of new knowledge, but are not fully considered in this work. The current work is primarily intended to describe a measurement system and provide an example of its application to the Italian case: the results should be interpreted in this sense.

  9. From Azagra-Caro (2007): “We follow Cohen and Levinthal’s (1990) definition of absorptive capacity: a limit to the rate or quantity of scientific or technological information that a firm can absorb. To justify the extension of the concept of absorptive capacity from firms to regions see Niosi and Bellon (2002)”.

  10. To enable comparison between regions, each seat of a private enterprise, if it was involved in co-authorship of an article, was considered as a distinct enterprise. For this reason the number of “enterprises” increases from 483 to 509.

  11. The previous finding that, on average, each university-industry publication is authored by two academics allows to consider α equal to 1/2. This number can readily be adjusted according to the characteristics of each specific SDS, to appropriately adapt the analysis.

  12. The figures for numbers of scientists in each SDS, averaged over the triennium under consideration, were obtained from a database of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research.

  13. This interpretation is not intended as a superficial suggestion that universities should resize their research capacity in the SDS examined. Capacity must also be planned in relation to the other two primary roles of the university: higher education and research.

  14. The term “social proximity” is used in the sense given by Boschma (2005): “Social proximity is defined here in terms of embedded relations between agents at the micro-level. Relations between actors are socially embedded when they involve trust based on friendship, kinship and experience”.

  15. Further development of the proposed model could remove this assumption and take dues consideration of the effect of different distances.

  16. The greater difficulty involved in activating extra-regional compared to intra-regional collaborations could be considered by assigning a higher weight to extra-regional performance in the calculation of overall performance.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Solazzi, M. Assessing public–private research collaboration: is it possible to compare university performance?. Scientometrics 84, 173–197 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0104-0

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