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Trust and incentives in academic research and the position of universities within innovation systems

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Abstract

Academic research has evolved tremendously over the last century. The middle of the twentieth century saw the development of research and the strengthening of trust both within academia and between academics and external actors. Since the later part of the twentieth century, however, the development of academic research has been characterised by reduced trust in universities and academics. It is argued that the lowering degrees of trust in universities and science are reflected in the current incentives in academia, often driven by governmental funding agencies, and the result of the altered position of universities within innovation systems. Universities are still important contributors to knowledge production, but they have slowly become more peripheral within innovation systems. Rather than setting their own research directions, they face strong incentives to do research primarily to serve others. This requires them to interact with organisations with which they have little in common and with which they find it difficult to communicate. The academic research pendulum seems to have swung too much towards knowledge transfer and application, with problematic outcomes. These developments indicate that it is necessary to reassess the purposes and potential benefits of academic research to restore trust in universities and increase the integrity and usefulness of research.

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Notes

  1. Some authors have argued that this is also true for grant applications because research funding evaluators tend to favour safer rather than riskier and more innovative grant applications (Gallo et al., 2018).

  2. Therefore, it is not surprising that an increasing number of predatory journals are emerging because many academics must publish their research to ensure their survival in the uncertain academic environment of their institution where publication numbers may be more relevant than any actual advancement of knowledge (Merktan et al., 2021).

  3. In the Soviet Union, the development path was different, partly due to ideological factors.

  4. Recent research has shown that the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and incentives is more complex than suggested by studies in the 1970s. Intrinsic motivations and incentives have been shown to enable scientists to be more productive in research (Horodnic & Zait, 2015). Rijnsoever and Hessels (2021) also found that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations play an influential role in academics’ participation in scholarly activities and the commercialization of research findings.

  5. Naturally, these premises impacted some fields of science, higher education institutions, and countries than others. A substantial amount of academic research has little or no relationship to industry or academic utility (Klavans & Boyack, 2017). Partly derived from this innovation model, the increased political and institutional pressure for research to have practical applications with a greater impact, such as favouring users’ application of academic knowledge, has affected academic freedoms, environments, and work (Martin-Sardesai et al., 2016).

  6. The OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators dataset is available from https://stats.oecd.org/. The data were accessed on October 28, 2021.

  7. It is not useful to compare the outputs between higher education and the business sector in this analysis because they are not directly comparable. One sector focuses on producing scientific publications while the other sector focuses on producing or offering new products and services. The number of publications (essentially produced by universities) and the number of patents (essentially produced by the business sector) have increased, but this is an expected result due to growing inputs from funding and researchers (Arora et al., 2020).

  8. The relationship between universities of applied sciences and non-academic actors may imply a greater level of trust and interaction between them than in the relationship between comprehensive universities and non-academic actors because the mission of the former is more oriented towards facilitating collaboration and knowledge transfer to the business sector, not-for-profit sectors, and governments (Po et al., 2016).

  9. Universities have established technology transfer offices, collaborative research centres, and university–industry Incubators in an attempt to mitigate the cognitive and cultural distance between academic and non-academic groups while promoting the physical and social proximity within these shared spaces (see Villani et al., 2017).

  10. The innovation helix framework assesses the interactions between different sectors in their research collaboration activities. The triple innovation helix framework emerged in the late 1990s to include universities, government, and business (industry) in research collaborations (Leydesdorff & Etzkowitz, 1998). In the late 2000s, the quadruple and quintuple helix innovation models were developed by adding two more helixes to the innovation model: that is, civil society (i.e., culture- and media-based public) and the natural environment (Carayannis et al., 2012).

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Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful for the insightful comments offered by my colleagues Brendan Cantwell, Simon Marginson, and Rosemary Deem. These comments were critical to improve the quality of the article.

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Horta, H. Trust and incentives in academic research and the position of universities within innovation systems. High Educ 84, 1343–1363 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00954-1

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