The role of institutions and firm characteristics in the networks of firm publications. An analysis of the Italian biotech sector through the Social Network Analysis

In this paper we analyse, through the instrument of the social network analysis, the network of co-authorships in the publications of the firms belonging to the Italian life-science biotech sector. The aim of the paper is to analyse the role of the different institutions (universities, research centres, hospitals and firms) inside such network. We try to conduct this analysis in depth, taking into consideration also the nature and characteristics of the biotech firms. We use a classification of the biotech firms according to the criteria suggested by OCED and we analyse the characteristics of the networks generated by the publications of each typology of firm, focusing the attention on the role played by the different institutions inside each of them. Therefore, crossing two dimensions of the analysis (nature of the institutions, characteristics of the firms) we try to shed new light on the architecture of the sectoral system of innovation, that may be considered a relevant part of the whole Italian national system of innovation. The analysis shows that the Italian innovation system is based on a balance among different institutions, each of them having a prevalent function. The central role is covered by the universities, particularly of the great universities in the Northern Italy, the more industrialised part of the country; their prominent role, among the different kinds of institutions, is common to all the typologies of biotech firms, with particularly strong ties with R&D biotech firms and a limited exception in the network of publications of the so-called targeted biotech firms that, being wholesaler, are more interested in collaboration with institution oriented to the “application” of biotechnologies. Research centres have an important role in bridging different institutions, as it is possible to infer from their frequent presence in large and heterogeneous networks of co-autorship. Collaboration with hospitals is less systematic, but they have a prominent role in more applied research, as it is demonstrated by the central role they have in the network of publications of the targeted firms. This analysis also shows a possible point of weakness of the Italian system of innovation, represented by the low degree of collaboration among different firms, at least on the point of view of co-autorship of scientific publication in the biotech sector

"Who and where are the co-authors? The relationship between institutional and geographic distance in scientific publications"

The main goal of our research is to analyse the relationship between geographical and institutional distance in research collaboration. Given that there is institutional distance if different kinds of institutions collaborate, we want to verify if such distance changes, and in what direction, when the physical distance increases. This analysis is conducted at an aggregated level, than at a more disaggregated one, taking some factors into consideration: on one side the quality and relevance of the papers; on the other side the different nature and aims, therefore the different behaviour, of different institutions. Regarding the analysis tools, the social network analysis is joined with the regression analysis. The more relevant results may be synthesized in this way: at a more aggregate level the direction of the relationship between spatial and institutional distance does not emerge with full statistical evidence; at a more disaggregate level the results emerge more clearly: taking into consideration the papers that receive few citations (that may be considered as results of project of limited scientific relevance or quality), the relationship between geographical and institutional distance is inverse; among more cited papers, the relationship is direct. On another side, taking the behaviour of different institutions into consideration, we observe an inverse relationship between spatial and institutional distance for firms, universities and research centres, a direct relationship for hospitals. The phenomenon of inter-institutional collaboration is seen through the lens of co-autorship of scientific publications in the Italian biotech sector. We analyse a database including the publications done by the Italian biotech firms from 2003 to 2005; the institutions the authors of the publications belong to are registered and classified in four categories (firms, universities, hospitals and research centres); their localization is registered too

La ricerca universitaria verso il mercato per il trasferimento tecnologico e rischi per l’”open science”: posizioni teoriche e filoni di indagine empirica

Da oltre un ventennio la ricerca universitaria è decisamente uscita dalla tradizionale “torre d’avorio” e le collaborazioni di ricerca con l’industria e la tutela della proprietà intellettuale sui risultati della ricerca sono diventati fenomeni consistenti ed in crescita. Ne è derivato un ampio dibattito sul possibile trade-off tra incremento dei benefici per la trasmissione diretta della conoscenza tra accademia e industria e rischi per la qualità e il grado di diffusione della conoscenza universitaria. Perché il dibattito non si riduca a un mero confronto ideologico è necessario tenere presenti i principi teorici di paradigmi alternativi della ricerca pubblica e richiamare e implementare gli ambiti di studio empirico sul problema. Questo articolo richiama appunto alcune posizioni del dibattito teorico e fa una sintetica rassegna dei principali filoni di ricerca empirica attinenti a questo dibattito

Incentivi alla ricerca e sviluppo in Italia: una indagine sugli effetti della Legge 46/82

The current economic crisis has put government intervention and policy evaluation at the centre of the debate on industrial development policy. Government efforts to stimulate a structural change of Italian industries are needed and in this context it becomes fundamental to engage in evaluation exercises in order to understand what policies are working. The paper offers an evaluation exercise on the major instruments used to promote R&D and innovation activities of Italian firms. We concentrate in particular on Law 46/82 and we look at the effects of the incentives it provides on firms expenditures on R&D and on new employment generation. We also consider the effects of such incentives when other similar laws are at work. Results suggest that a rethinking of the system of incentives might be needed to limit an inefficient overlapping of instruments.Evaluation of industrial policies; R&D and innovation; R&D incentives

Natural IgG antibodies to β amyloid are decreased in patients with Parkinson's disease

: Natural antibodies (nAbs) against aggregation-prone proteins have been found in healthy normal subjects. These proteins likely have a pathogenetic role in neurodegenerative diseases of ageing. They include the amyloid β (Aβ) protein which may play an important role in Alzheimer's dementia (AD), and α-synuclein, a major determinant of Parkinson's disease (PD). We measured nAbs to Aβ in a group of Italian patients with AD, vascular dementia, non-demented PD patients and healthy elderly controls. We found that Aβ antibody levels in AD were similar to age- and sex-matched controls, but contrary to our expectations, they were significantly reduced in PD. This may identify patients that could be more prone to amyloid aggregation

Recombinant factor VIIa concentrate versus plasma-derived concentrates for treating acute bleeding episodes in people with haemophilia and inhibitors

In people with haemophilia, therapeutic clotting agents might be recognised as a foreign protein and induce anti-factor VIII antibodies, known as 'inhibitors'. Drugs insensitive to such antibodies, either recombinant or plasma-derived, are called factor VIII 'by-passing' agents and used for treatment of bleeding in people with inhibitors

La ricerca in collaborazione con l'industria dei docenti universitari: aggiornamento sugli esiti di un questionario

Questo articolo aggiorna i risultati di un questionario che è stato oggetto di trattazione dell’articolo “Ricerca industriale di scienziati accademici: una opportunità o un rischio per la open science? Evidenza empirica, considerazioni teoriche ed esiti di un questionario in tre università italiane”, Working paper n.20/2005 del Dipartimento di Economia Istituzioni Territorio dell’Università di Ferrara.. Ai precedenti 80 questionari svolti in tre università si aggiungono i risultati di altri 88 questionari, con le stesse domande più alcune nuove, svolti in altre cinque università

New insights on the relationships between geographic and institutional distance in research collaborations: a long period analysis

This paper analyses the relationship between institutional and geographic distance in scientific collaborations, evaluating the possible changes when a long period (sixteen years) is taken into consideration and discussing the use of some alternative measures of institutional distance. The main result, obtained by analysing the publications of the Italian biotech firms, is that international publications present an higher institutional distance than national papers, particularly in the early years, while there is no significant difference in institutional distance between regional and extra-regional papers, suggesting that opposite incentives are in action at different geographic scales and in different periods

La ricerca in collaborazione con l'industria dei docenti universitari: aggiornamenti sugli esiti di un questionario

Questo articolo aggiorna i risultati di un questionario che è stato oggetto di trattazione dell’articolo “Ricerca industriale di scienziati accademici: una opportunità o un rischio per la open science? Evidenza empirica, considerazioni teoriche ed esiti di un questionario in tre università italiane”, Working paper n.20/2005 del Dipartimento di Economia Istituzioni Territorio dell’Università di Ferrara.. Ai precedenti 80 questionari svolti in tre università si aggiungono i risultati di altri 88 questionari, con le stesse domande più alcune nuove, svolti in altre cinque università

Internal and external sources of innovation in the Italian biotech sector

A common view among many academics and policy makers is that biotech offers enormous opportunities for improving competitiveness and economic growth. For this reason there is a growing need to set up appropriate policy to improve the adoption and diffusion of biotech innovation. Nevertheless, there are many interpretative problems about the identification of the biotech firms, due to the uncertainty about the border of the sector itself. This paper provides a contribution to better define and understand the biotech industry, pointing out the differences inside the sector and the different behaviour of the firms according to their typology. In fact this paper, basing on a previous work of classification of the Italian biotech firms according to the OECD standards, uses such a classification in order to better understand the different importance, inside the biotech sector, of the internal and external sources of knowledge, in the production of innovation. Our hypothesis is, in fact, that the relation between internal and external source, on one side, and innovation, on the other side, has different characteristics if we distinguish between the different classes in which the production activities are divided, according to the OECD classification. We try to test this hypothesis trough the analysis of the data coming from a questionnaire we submitted to several Italian biotech firms