Return mobility of scientists and knowledge circulation : an exploratory approach to scientists attitudes and perspectives

The paper addresses the international mobility and return of scientists and its implications for regions/countries with weaker scientific and technological systems. It focuses on the “return dilemma” and, using the Portuguese case as empirical setting, discusses the conditions for return, the “diaspora” alternative and the role of policies in minimising the impacts of mobility flows. Despite the growing importance assumed by scientific mobility, our understanding of mobility flows, in particular of return mobility, is still deficient. Data about the level of mobility and mobility paths is scarce and difficult to obtain and the knowledge about expatriate scientists’ motivations and strategies, namely their attitudes towards the home country and their perspectives concerning career and return mobility, remains limited. The research presented in this paper is a preliminary contribution to attend to some of these issues. A method is proposed to address some methodological problems in empirical research on scientific mobility. It permits to delimit a sample of “scientifically productive” expatriate scientists in specific fields, to locate these scientists and to trace their professional trajectories, thus making possible to collect information on their mobility behaviour as well as to gain some preliminary insights on their attitudes and perspectives. This methodology is experimentally applied to the Portuguese case. Notwithstanding its exploratory nature, the empirical research provides some insights into the behaviour of a younger generation of “scientifically productive scientists” in a field with a strong international mobility pattern (biotechnology), which can be relevant for policy makin

How inventor royalty shares affect patenting and income in Portugal and Spain

Portuguese and Spanish universities have adopted well-defined royalty sharing schedules during the last fifteen years. We investigate whether these inventor royalty shares have been effective at stimulating inventors’ efforts and ultimately improving university outcomes. We base our empirical analysis on university-level data as well as on new self-collected surveys completed by inventors and Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs). Econometric evidence from the university-level data set indicates that royalty shares have no impact on patenting or licensing income. The same result emerges from the inventors’ survey, with most respondents claiming to be largely unaffected by royalty sharing. Evidence from both the TTO and inventors’ surveys suggests that inventors do not react to royalty sharing because of the poor commercial prospects of their inventions, which means there is little income to be shared. These poor prospects appear to reflect the fact that the TTOs do not focus sufficiently on commercializing inventions and inventors are unable to produce potentially licensable inventions

Oceans of energy? The non-linear trajectory of the emerging wave energy technology

This paper addresses the construction and structuring of a technological niche – i.e. a protected space where promising but still underperforming technologies are stabilized and articulated with societal needs – and discusses the processes that influence niche development and may enable niche breakout. In theoretical terms the paper is grounded on the multi-level approach to sustainability transitions, and particularly on the niche literature. But it also attempts to address the limitations of this literature in what concerns the spatial dimension of niche development. It is argued that technological niches can transcend the narrow territorial boundaries to which they are often confined, and encompass communities and actions that span several spatial levels, without losing some territorial embeddedness. It is further proposed that these features shape the niche trajectory and, therefore, need to be explicitly considered by the niche theoretical framework. To address this problem the paper builds on and extends the socio-cognitive perspective to technology development, introducing a further dimension – space – which broadens the concept of technological niche and permits to better capture the complexity of niche behaviour. This extended framework is applied to the case of an emerging renewable energy technology – wave energy - which exhibits a particularly slow and non-linear development trajectory. The empirical analysis starts by examining how an “overall niche space” in wave energy was spatially constructed over time. Then it investigates in greater detail the niche development processes that took place in Portugal, a country that was among the pioneers in the field, and whose actors have been, from very early stages, engaged in the activities conducted at various spatial levels. Through this combined analysis, the paper seeks to understand whether and how niche development is shaped by processes taking place at different spatial levels. More specifically it investigates the interplay between territorial and relational elements in niche development, and how these different dynamics influence the performance of the niche processes and impact on the overall niche trajectory. The results confirm the niche multi-spatial dynamics, showing that it is shaped by the interplay between a niche relational space constructed by actors’ actions and interactions on/across levels, and the territorial effects introduced by these actors’ embeddedness in particular geographical and institutional settings. They contribute to a more precise understanding of the processes that can accelerate or slow down the trajectory of a technological niche. In addition, the results shed some light into the niche activities conducted in/originating from a specific territorial setting - Portugal - offering some insights into the behaviour of key actors and its implications for the positioning of the country in the emerging field, which can be relevant for the formulation of strategies and policies for this area

Do public research organisations own most patents invented by their staff?

Trabajo presentado a la BETA Conference on "The economic analysis of knowledge production in academia" celebrada en Strasbourg (Francia) el 2 de Julio de 2010.Technology ownership and knowledge transfer aim at the dissemination of public research results usually in one direction – from the university or public research organisation (PRO) that produced the results. However, the complementarities between these types of instruments are not clear compared to the bidirectional channels of knowledge exchange. We analyse one PRO in Spain, a country that is peculiar in terms of infrequent changes to the legislations on science and patents and a predominance of PRO-owned over PRO-invented patents, similar to the situation in the USA but different from that in most EU member states. Against this background, knowledge transfer (measured through PRO-invented patents) increases faster than technology ownership (measured through PRO-owned patents). This situation may be damaging to knowledge exchange (measured through PRO co-owned patents).Peer reviewe

Do public research organisations own most patents invented by their staff?

[EN] Technology ownership and knowledge transfer aim at the dissemination of public research results, usually in one direction – from the university or public research organisation (PRO) that produced the results. However, the complementarities between these types of instruments are not clear compared to the bidirectional channels of knowledge exchange. We analyse one PRO in Spain, a country that is peculiar in terms of infrequent changes to the legislation on science and patents and a predominance of PRO-owned over PRO-invented patents, similar to the situation in the USA but different from that in most EU member states. Against this background, knowledge transfer (measured through PROinvented patents) increases faster than technology ownership (measured through PRO-owned patents). This situation may be damaging to knowledge exchange (measured through PRO co-owned patents).Azagra-Caro, JM. (2011). Do public research organisations own most patents invented by their staff?. Science and Public Policy. 38(3):237-250. doi:10.3152/016502611X12849792159272S23725038

National Innovation Systems and Industry Science Relationships in Europe

International audienceGlobalisation means radical changes in foreign affairs and consequently in tariffs. Domestic markets are no longer sanctuaries for big firms which are more and more multinational in their ownership, governance, scope and aims. All these evolutions challenge the relevance of the "national" innovation system concept whereas American authors doubt if the American innovation system will be able to maintain its high level of performance as all of the central components of the innovation system now are undergoing change. Structural changes in the national systems of innovation system, are not occurring in isolation and may well result in some "convergence" in structure which would imply that the raison d'être of the NIS analysis could disappear. The European integration sets up another challenge to the NIS analysis. What will come out from the old national innovation systems whereas there are currently three institutional settings to take into account to deal with industry science relationship? After reviewing some threats against the NIS, the paper shows that a great deal of globalisation is actually Europeanisation even if the European law framework is still very sketchy and analyses the possible emerging European innovation system. It insists on the increasing human capital mobility in high tech sectors and supply some evidence of an emerging European innovation systems. The small country case is also analysed with its variants as it appears when looking at Portugal and Austria. Simultaneously if the project driven ISR seems obsolete, innovation policies will more and more relying on the financing of basic research as well as on local, national, and European infrastructure. In the European case, it seems also important to improve the links between the higher education system and the SMEs

Networks, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer in Tourism Industry: An Empirical Study of SMEs in Portugal

The present study aims to investigate how commercialisation and knowledge transfer between the SMEs of the tourism sector and the higher education institutions (HEIs) are made, as well as to find out whether the SMEs of the tourism sector are part of tourism networks, and what their motivations are. We used a qualitative methodology, applying the triangulation method to eight SMEs and one HEI. The results indicate that the commercialisation and knowledge transfer between the SMEs and the HEIs are not effective. SMEs are part of regional networks of business innovation; however, they do not participate in R&D activities with HEIs. Some suggestions were made to SMEs, HEIs, and regional governments to speed up commercialisation and knowledge transfer in the tourism sector. We adapted the Triple Helix Model to the tourism sector, thus creating the “Triple Helix in the Tourism Context”. Only a few studies have researched knowledge commercialisation in the tourism sector, a gap that this article aims to compensate.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio