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Measuring university–industry collaboration in a regional innovation system

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Abstract

Studies of university–industry collaboration remain subject to important limitations due to the shortage of empirical data and a lack of consistency in that obtained to date. This article puts into practice a set of universities Third Mission indicators in a regional innovation system. Selected indicators previously compiled from literature were reorganized and pre-tested. We have undertaken two face-to-face surveys of 737 firms and 765 heads of research teams, respectively. The results test the validation of indicators and provide a complex map of university–industry linkages as well as some observations on the flexibility needed to address this issue.

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Notes

  1. Our study also includes non-university public research organizations, mainly the Spanish National Research Council centers and the regional government laboratories in the agricultural and health sectors. The joint size of these centers is considerably limited relative to the activity of universities in the region. However, almost all of these organizations have a legal status and labor conditions similar to the universities. In order to simplify we will only refer to universities in the text although it should be noted that by this we also mean public research organizations.

  2. We must point out that the bias is only in one direction. The majority of the small firms in the region in low technology sectors are not represented. However, practically all of the technology intensive firms as well as those that carry out significant R&D activities, from the very large to the very small, have received public aid, at least tax breaks, and therefore are included in the data file that we use as our source.

  3. In the Spanish national innovation survey the companies that declared that they have some sort of collaboration in R&D with universities or public agencies in 2005 were 8% (PITEC 2005).

  4. The registry of research teams covers more than 90% of the scientific community in the public sector. The regional university system consists of nine public universities that employ close to 17,000 professors and researchers in all of the university categories (Fernández-Esquinas et al. 2008), together with 1,200 which are part of public research organisations (CICE 2006). Researchers that are part of bodies outside of the public sphere or those that do not realize year on year activities in said groups are not included in the registry.

  5. For this part of our analysis, the firms that exclusively indicated that they have informal relationships or other types of non-specific interactions have been added to the group which had no relations at all.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an Andalusia Regional R&D and Innovation Grant Reference SEJ2005-873. We thank Richard Woolley and Carolina Cañibano for their interesting comments and suggestions as well as some others anonymous reviews.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Advanced Social Studies, Spanish National Research Council (IESA-CSIC), Campo Santo de los Mártires, 7, 14004, Córdoba, Spain

    Irene Ramos-Vielba, Manuel Fernández-Esquinas & Elena Espinosa-de-los-Monteros

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  1. Irene Ramos-Vielba
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  2. Manuel Fernández-Esquinas
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  3. Elena Espinosa-de-los-Monteros
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Correspondence to Manuel Fernández-Esquinas.

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Ramos-Vielba, I., Fernández-Esquinas, M. & Espinosa-de-los-Monteros, E. Measuring university–industry collaboration in a regional innovation system. Scientometrics 84, 649–667 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0113-z

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