Abstract
This article focuses on the wide variety of channels through which the process of knowledge transfer occurs. The overall objective is to show the complexity of relationships between researchers and firms in a university system, and to identify some specific factors that influence such interactions. Our case study involves a face-to-face survey of 765 heads of research teams in a regional system to contrast the multiple forms of university–industry collaborative linkages. Drawing on the exploitation of a data set developed for the purpose, we show that for a majority of universities the thrust of their collaborative experiences is devoted to tacit knowledge rather than to intellectual property rights. Researchers actively engage in the provision of different services to firms such as consulting work, commissioned or joint research projects, and human resources training. Research teams also participate in non-academic knowledge dissemination and informal networking. The results of our study enable us to draw some policy implications for university administrators and policymakers. A focus on patents and spin-offs as indicators of collaborative research ignores the limits of many of the economic and productive contexts in which universities are embedded. It may also be detrimental to the strengthening of emerging trends that are oriented towards softer collaborative experiences and other forms of knowledge transfer.
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Notes
In addition to its traditional tasks of teaching and research, the term Third Mission is broadly used for universities knowledge transfer activities, especially in the European context. The Third Mission refers to the direct engagement of higher education institutions with their social and economic environments (Molas-Gallart 2005: 136). It refers to “all activities concerned with the generation, use, application and exploitation of knowledge and other university capabilities outside academic environments” (Molas Gallart and Castro Martínez 2007: 321). “Third mission activities in universities stimulate and direct the application and exploitation of knowledge to the benefit of the social, cultural and economic development of our society.” (Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, Third Mission Committee). Some reflections focus on why such notions as ‘valoration’, ‘transfer’, ‘third steam’ or ‘third mission’, all linked with the research activities of universities, become central in most of the discussions that take place today on universities (Laredo 2007a, b).
The difficulties for making accountable the diversity of university knowledge transfer have been acknowledge by technology transfer offices. Evidence can be found in reports from the US Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM 2010) and the British University Companies Association (UNICO 2009), as well as from the Spanish Association of Technology Transfer Offices (RedOTRI 2010). They all acknowledge that other forms of knowledge transfer are under measured. Some authors also observe that at the same time an increasing number of studies use data from European universities to complement the literature based on US observations investigating the patterns of diffusion of inventions via patenting and IPR (among others: Thursby and Thursby 2002; Feldman et al. 2002; Di Gregorio and Shane 2003; Friedman and Silberman 2003; Bercovitz and Feldman 2004).
The study also covers public research organizations (PRO) located in the region, mainly CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) institutes. Given that universities are highly predominant, and careers and organizational procedures in most PRO are similar to the ones used by universities, for clarity purposes we use the terms ‘university research system’ or ‘university–industry collaboration’. When we refer to ‘universities’ we also include PRO in the region.
These studies, which centred on university–industry linkages in both Australia and the UK, identify catch-up regions as more common in their respective territories. Highly technologically developed regions are in fact an exception. Studies on the European context (Bonaccorsi and Daraio 2007) show the specialization patterns of universities according to the technological intensity of the surrounding regions. That is why Andalusia´s regional characteristics (mainly the low technological component of its fabric) make this kind of analysis especially interesting due to its possible implications for similar regions with low-intensity R&D systems.
Andalusia is situated in the south of Spain. With nine million inhabitants, it is the largest region in the country in population and the second largest in terms of surface area. It is extremely diverse in both its territorial composition and its degree of development and income-per-capita in urban, rural and coastal areas.
A total of 413 patents in 2005, 113 of them were registered by Andalusian universities (CICE 2006). In 2006 only 10% of total patents in Spain originated in Andalusia, which represents a low proportion in the national context (Merchán and Fernández Esquinas 2011) Similar levels of patenting activity were maintained in 2008, according to state statistics. These figures are low when compared with other regional university systems with stronger scientific background which are located in more knowledge intensive environments.
According to the figures from the Institute of National Statistics referred to 2007, the percentage of researchers at universities is 65%, compared with 10% in the public administration and 25% in firms.
Sometimes due to the combination of political interests in the regional government, where R&D managers have been linked with universities, and on other occasions due to the difficulty in directing science policies to firms with little absorptive capacity and due to the need to concentrate industrial policy on reconverting large obsolete industrial sectors.
Since 1989 research teams have been officially associated with the financing of other tools of regional science policy such as research grants, contracts for research assistants and infrastructure. The regional government has not financed projects until 2006, when a competitive grant process was announced for universities and public centres.
The registry of research teams covers more than 90% of the scientific community in the public sector. Researchers that are part of bodies outside of the public sphere or those that do not realize year-on-year activities in said teams are not included in the registry.
A particular feature of the regional university system is that knowledge transfer interchange with external organizations is carried out by research teams. The fact that we use research teams as our unit of analysis enlarges our scope and enables us to decompose the complexity of real dynamics of university–industry interactions beyond only individual relationships, which represent just a part of the large variety of these kinds of linkages. Face-to face interviews with the scientific leaders of the teams supplied a wide range of information on a set of variables, from macro to micro level and from structural to individual, which contributes to better understanding factors that diversify and influence cross sector collaboration.
The first wave of interviews with the original sample resulted in 74% of response rate. The second wave was directed to a substitute random sample of 250 groups, with a similar response rate.
Percent of variance for each factor can be observed in Table I of the Statistical Appendix. The same procedure of a factor analysis followed by a cluster analysis was conducted using interval variables referring to the number of contacts in the same given period. These analyses have not led to clearly identifiable results. The interval measurements obtained using this fieldwork scheme does not contain information to create significant groups.
The procedure consisted of a two-step cluster analysis using Schwarz’s Bayesian Criterion (BIC) implemented in SPSS version 14.
Some additional qualitative work we pursued on specific collaborative cases within the Andalusian region shows that interpersonal exchanges are in fact at the origin of most university–industry relations, which often start on such a basis and then generate networks of interactions and become increasingly complex. Other questions from the same survey confirm the importance of personal relationships: 56% of research teams had a personal link with a firm worker or a firm executive before starting the collaboration. Personal relationships are placed fourth when ranking the importance given to all knowledge transfer channels, after contract research, collaborative research projects and consultancy. Interpersonal networks can therefore be the origin of later interorganizational linkages (Perkmann and Walsh 2007).
Some limitations derived from the type of industrial tissue of catch-up regions such as Andalusia—which is characterized by a predominance of SMEs, with an important service sector and low- and medium-tech manufacturing presence—can reduce local business capacity to absorb and apply IPR related activities and consequently inhibit major collaboration (Fernández-Esquinas and Ramos-Vielba 2011). However, other multiple potential university–industry interactions could take place and generate synergies. Then the promotion of balanced, varied and distributed university–industry linkages rather than a concentration on IPR becomes a more realistic and effective policy for these kinds of environments.
A complementary survey focusing on firms provides evidence on the dynamics of the interactions in the Andalusia’s regional environment and their relation with innovation processes (Fernández-Esquinas et al. 2010). The results show that a minority group assigns a special importance to universities compared to other sources of innovation, but at the same time the most innovative firms give importance to a wide range of university relationships together with other firms and knowledge providers Awareness and positive perception can then potentially increase.
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Acknowledgments
A previous version of this article was awarded as ‘The Best Paper’ at the Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy, held at The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, USA, 2–3 October 2009. The authors would like to thank the organizers of the Atlanta conference and the Award Commission for this concession. We additionally thank Naubahar Sharif for his valuable comments and to the anonymous reviewers of the paper for their useful suggestions. The authors also express their gratitude to Richard Woolley for his editing help, to Nuria Hernández for her contribution to the field work and to Elena Espinosa for her assistance with the statistical analysis. This work was possible thanks to a project grant within the Regional Plan for R&D and Innovation awarded by the Government of Andalusia, Spain (Ref. 2005-00873). The authors thank the support of Manuel Pérez-Yruela in the development of this project.
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Ramos-Vielba, I., Fernández-Esquinas, M. Beneath the tip of the iceberg: exploring the multiple forms of university–industry linkages. High Educ 64, 237–265 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9491-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9491-2